The Bell Tower

by Walter Blum

  “Is it about the station?”

  “I guess it’s pretty obvious, Adam.” He seemed tired, but that was how he’d looked for several weeks. The blue eyes were clouded, and the ruddy face had lost some of its polish. “I’m going to have to sell. It’s just a matter of time. I’m tired, and I’m sick, and—well, Adam, you might as well know it. I have cancer.”

  Adam pulled up. He had never had much experience with serious illness, and he was too young to have mastered the necessary phrases. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “How long?”

  “It’s prostate cancer. I’ve had it for years, but now it seems the cancer has metastasized. You know what that means, Adam?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. The upshot is that the doctor has given me another six months. He says I won’t live to see my fifty-fifth birthday.”

  “Does it—?”

  “No, there’s very little pain. Later on, maybe, but right now all I feel is worn out and a little numb. There are a lot of things my wife and I planned on, and now we won’t be able to do them. I think we’ll do some traveling, but I can’t keep running this station. I’ve got to unload it as soon as I can find a buyer. Everyone on the staff will be affected, of course. I assume you have plans?”

  “Yes—” Adam said hesitantly.

  “Well, I’ll give you the best references, Adam. Everyone at WCAN deserves that, if nothing else. Why don’t you bring Susan over to the house one of these days? We’ll have a drink, all right?”

  “Sir, I’m really sorry about this. I didn’t know.”

  “Why should you?” Baines said, escorting him to the door. “We all tend to our own garden. Sometimes the flowers bloom, and sometimes—well, it doesn’t seem to matter how much you water them. In the end it’s all gone.”

  Adam left the office with his spirits inches off the ground. It seemed as though the world was slipping off its track, and no one knew how to get it back. The air was filled with anxiety. For no good reason he found himself staring, in his imagination, at faceless men in the Kremlin with baggy gray suits and atomic missiles aimed at the heart of America. How long before someone pressed the button and Canelius felt their wrath? He recalled hearing the president talk about prosperity, and yet he knew that millions were still inching their way across the landscape below the poverty line. Amy O’Neill was right. Words were one thing, the truth was something else. It only made him feel melancholy.

  That afternoon, when he ripped the first news bulletins off the AP teletype machine, the world crowded around him in all its absurdity. Marilyn Monroe had married the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, and announced that she was ready to play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. America smiled, but there was a sadness about this most beautiful woman that lurked behind the eyes. You could see it. You could feel it. At night, Ed Murrow with his ubiquitous camera had people riveted to their TV sets as he toured the celebrities’ homes, pretending that it was just a casual, drop-in visit. Pink was the latest fashion statement, but people chewed green chlorophyll tablets to stop bad breath. There was a color for every twist in the road to nothingness.

  Ed Murrow and chlorophyll tablets and the monsters in the Kremlin were of a piece with what was happening at WCAN. But here it was real death, not the romantic, extravagant kind you read about and heard on the radio. The imminence of death was a new sensation for him. He had always imagined, in the back of his mind, that life simply went on forever, like an ocean liner on an endless cruise. Old people died, of course, but they were the ones with the blue-veined hands, the shuffling walk, the rheumy eyes and thin white hair. Things like that didn’t happen in the prime of life, to someone like Hunter Baines.

  Now, everywhere he looked, old things seemed to be dying and change floated like an angry wasp in the air. One morning, buried in the back pages of the Post-Ledger, he came upon a story about a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. A middle-aged Negro woman, it seems, had refused to yield her seat in the bus to a white man, as was customary. In protest the city’s Negro community, led by a young Baptist minister, rose up and refused to patronize the city’s buses.

  People there tried to look the other way, but the bottle had been cracked. Demonstrations were held. Letters to the editor poured in. Even people in Canelius felt threatened. The story moved from the back of the paper to page one. What most surprised Adam, though, was the reaction of the Fairmount Country Club members. You’d think Jews would show a little more sympathy toward members of a minority group who, like them, had known oppression. Not so. He couldn’t understand why.

  “You’re in the South,” Susan told him.

  “I know, but there are such things as common courtesy,” Adam reasoned. “Where does it say a woman has to give up her seat in the bus to a man?”

  “She was a Negro,” Susan said, and changed the subject.

  He realized there were things about his wife he still did not understand, but he was not about to push the envelope, at least not yet. Larry’s words came back to him, how someday there would be Negroes even in the Palm Room at the Jefferson Davis Hotel—but Susan’s thoughts were elsewhere. She was involved in the preparations for the Midsummer Ball. She could not be bothered with editorials in the paper or strange things going in far-off Montgomery, Alabama.

  Although the committee met only once a week, there was something about these get-togethers that meant a great deal to her. She had missed the socializing, he realized. Seeing people she’d grown up with, giggling at midnight gab fests in a girlfriend’s bedroom, meeting around a soda, attending singles parties, these were the things that had gone out of her life.

  “I’m an old married woman now,” she complained.

  “Don’t say that,” he warned. “You may be married, but you’re not old.”

  “I’ve been out of circulation,” she said.

  It was a funny expression. It made him think of a dollar bill that has been folded and soiled and nicked in the corners, and finally, when the poor thing has become too unsightly to use any more, you take it back to the mint, stuff it in an oven with a lot of other old dollar bills and turn up the fire. But his precious beauty hardly fit that category. She was barely twenty. Her skin was as soft and white as the feathers of a swan, her eyes glowed, her smile glistened. She had actually lost a few pounds, and her waistline would be the envy of any professional model. If she weren’t his, he thought, there would be multitudes of young men—all handsome and eligible—lining up at the door for a chance to marry her.

  Of course, if she really were an old married woman, that would make him an old married man, and he didn’t think of himself that way. It was all too new, too different from anything he’d known before. For the first time in his life, possibly the only time, he loved another person with every fiber of his being. He had no intention of letting any of it get away. If there were rough spots ahead, he’d smooth them over. If there were problems, he’d turn on his magic filter and drown the clamor in white noise. Here in the tower there was only music, sweet, pure and passionate. On his program schedule, that was the only guest allowed past the door.

  Even that disturbing phone call barely ruffled the surface of his existence. He was out on the porch picking up the morning paper when it came. The air was soft and warm. He could hear the ringing, and then Susan answering it. A moment later she appeared at the door.

  “It’s for you,” she said, rather surprised that he should be getting calls at home.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said indifferently. “I don’t recognize the voice. He sounds like a Northerner, someone from New York.”

  It was Uncle Harry, a relative he barely knew and rarely came in contact with. Uncle Harry lived in Queens, no more than a ten-minute subway ride from the building where Adam had grown up, but he and his sister, Adam’s mother, were at odds with each other and hadn’t spoken in years. To hear his voice on the phone now was strange, and Adam’s first thought was that may
be he was being hit up for a loan. But it wasn’t money Harry wanted.

  Word had come from the hospital early that morning. Congestive heart failure. Lou Bernstein had suffered with the condition for more than a year, but being the sort who does not like confiding in others, even his own son, he kept it to himself. His father had been a faithful correspondent, however, and when no letter arrived that week, Adam knew something must be wrong. Suddenly, it was as if he were surrounded by death—first Hunter Baines’ illness and now his father.

  “Where?” he wanted to know.

  “Queens General Hospital.” Harry’s tone was unemotional. All he wanted to know was how soon Adam could be on a plane for New York. The funeral, he said, was planned for Thursday, two days hence. Adam was to call back and give the flight number.

  He would meet him at the airport, he said, and hung up.

  16

  The immense sprawl that was New York stretched below him, houses and streets collected into neighborhoods and then into boroughs and then into megalopolis and beyond that—who knows? A calendar of nothingness, each month looking like the one that came before. You could wander up and down the parade of days and never find your way out. Venice multiplied a thousand times, its canals hardened into strips of cement that reached for the horizon. The oceans of the moon were no more dead, no more airless.

  He thought of the Bell Tower, the view of trees and lakes and mountains in the distance, far to the west. Everything was so green there; here it was all brick and gray stone. He thought of the purple wall hangings, the candles, the Persian carpets and the plate glass window that gazed out and down into people’s homes, into the rooms where they ate and slept and fought and made love, that peered into their souls. He could sit in the captain’s chair and watch it happen, guarding the board with its dials and meters, the microphone before him, the music swelling and looping and rumbling in the engine room below, the passengers looking to him for the magic they knew he was capable of creating. But New York was nothing like that.

  Uncle Harry was waiting at the gate. Adam apologized for his wife’s absence. Susan had come down with a bad cold, as often happened these last few months. The cold had crept into her ears, and it was a well-known fact that doctors warned against traveling by plane if your ears were stuffed up, but she would come the next time.

  The elaborate apology was unnecessary. Uncle Harry, who wore a giant hearing aid with a cord that dangled down the side of his jacket, inhabited a world of his own and heard only what he wanted to hear. They drove through the gray and brown streets of Queens in Harry’s enormous black Buick, finned and flecked with city grime. A storm threatened. The air was heavy and humid, and thunder rumbled from the ocean far away.

  The service was held the next day at the Mount Sinai Funeral Home on Ocean Parkway. The Bernsteins’ rabbi gave the eulogy. Most of the attendees were relatives, with a smattering of Lou’s friends and long-time clients. Adam rode with his mother in the lead car to the cemetery, after which they all returned to the apartment for the first day of shivah.

  With drapes drawn and blinds closed, the place had taken on a sepulchral cast. Lights were dimmed, shoes doffed, mirrors covered with drop cloths so the mourners would not be tempted into forbidden vanity. A bridge table had been set up near the window to hold the various pastries and delicatessen items and traditional hard-boiled eggs brought in by neighbors and relatives. Some of the men wore hats; Adam, who did not own one, was handed a yarmulke at the funeral service and wore it the entire time he was in New York. By the time he left, the little cap seemed to have grown into the back of his head, like a flower. He had forgotten it was there.

  There seemed nothing left of Lou Bernstein in the apartment. His father had been a pack-a-day cigarette smoker but had given up the habit cold turkey, at his wife’s insistence. All the familiar tobacco odors had long since vanished. There were no ashtrays, no remnants of what had once been considered a shabby but innocent diversion. The knick-knacks on the end tables and the coffee table in the living room were all new, although they had that fussy quality that typified his mother’s predilections.

  Once, on one of several excursions to the bathroom, Adam wandered into his parents’ bedroom and falling prey to curiosity, praying that no one would stumble in the door, peeked inside the closet where his father’s suits and ties were still hanging. To his surprise, there were labels in the jackets and on the back of the ties that revealed a remarkably cultivated, expensive taste in clothing. It saddened him to know that in all these years, he had never taken the trouble to notice what his father wore or, for that matter, what he was trying to say.

  His own room, the one he had grown up in and fled to in search of a refuge, was no longer recognizable. It had been transformed into a guest bedroom; the bookcase where he kept his favorites, arranged alphabetically by author, had disappeared and the furniture was all new. Where was the trunk in which were stored the model airplanes he’d painstakingly constructed out of balsa wood, rubber bands and glue? Where was the bed he’d slept in all those years, lying with his head propped up on a pile of pillows while listening to episodes of One Man’s Family and Lorenzo Jones on the radio, which also doubled as a phonograph and a place for piling up books that were meant to be read, if and when he got around to them?

  Vanished, like flowers on an autumn afternoon. The room, the people, the familiar smells had receded into a past that could never be retrieved. Whatever this apartment represented now, he was sure of one thing, it was a home that would never again be his. He no longer belonged here. Sitting stiffly in a chair in a corner of the living room, feeling gauche and uncomfortable, he realized how out of place he was. There were cousins he hadn’t seen since boyhood. He no longer recognized them. Some were already approaching middle age, and they had little in common. The aunts and uncles were mysterious and strangely remote. The friends, many of them bridge partners of his mother, chattered mindlessly and it was hard to see what anyone looked like in the darkened living room. He felt as if he were in some ancient Persian harem, his head swimming in mist from a thousand invisible hookahs, listening to voices that spoke a language he didn’t understand.

  He wished he could have brought Susan. She would have softened the long night after the funeral; he would have had someone to talk to, someone he cared about, someone who lent a touch of familiarity to an alien world.

  And yet, this world of aliens was where it had all started. The yearning to be someone of importance. The need for people to recognize a part of him—even if it was only his voice—the urge to create and be re-created by others.

  And the shyness. How did that come about? he wondered. There was nothing in his childhood to suggest the sort of person who habitually withdrew from the world, hiding in the basements of imagination or the attics of illusion. In high school he’d befriended boys who spent hours by themselves working with chemistry sets, wiring up electrical circuits and studying drops of algae water with a microscope. They would gather in groups of four and five for a Saturday double feature, or a trip to the park for a pick-up soccer game. Even then, it was Adam who brought along the ball and was picked to be goalie because of a certain clumsiness with his feet. No one ever described him as a bundle of energy, and if the others were unavailable, he could just as easily spend his time curled up with a book.

  It was past midnight when the last of the guests finally went home. His mother had made up his old bedroom. She knocked on his door as he was beginning to undress, and he realized that she wanted to talk.

  “You’re happy?” she wanted to know.

  “Of course,” he said, thinking she was referring to the accommodations. He was sitting on the bed. She stood in the doorway, dressed in a flowing nightgown and a voluminous bathrobe. She had let out her iron gray hair. It came down to her shoulders, and he was glad she didn’t wear it that way all the time. She was not a beautiful woman, heavy in a rather aggressive way with the suggestion of a mustache and legs like tree trunks. For each yea
r past sixty, it seemed, two or three pounds had been added. He did not like to see her with her hair let out. It only made her look like something she could never be.

  “Why do you have to live in that place?” she wanted to know.

  “Canelius?”

  “That’s not a proper name for a city. Canelius. I never heard of such a name. What does it mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what people call the town. It’s where I live, it’s where I work.”

  “A radio station?”

  The question did not demand an answer. Adam sighed. The day had been a long one, and he wasn’t up to another of his mother’s typical cat-and-mouse games, which always ended at the same hole. It had rained the night before, the air was sticky and his clothes clung to his skin. Many people he knew with apartments were installing window boxes to defeat the elements, but his parents had never seen a need for such luxury. If God had meant for it to be cool, he would not have created summer for the punishment of those who transgressed. Even now you could feel the armies of late August knocking at the gates.

  The funeral, the burial and then the shivah, only made it more unpleasant. At times like this, many mothers and sons would be holding on to each other, sharing gestures of comfort, softening the pain with tears. But these two had never enjoyed such a relationship. She was not the sort of woman who cried easily, if at all. He felt as though he was always being held at arm’s length. It was as though the real Sylvia Bernstein had been stuffed into a closet along with all the musty old clothes and books and wedding presents that no one was ever meant to see. She had been at times a good mother, even a strong mother, but she could not offer what eluded her ability to give.