Last Respects

by Jerome Weidman

  I wonder if it is possible to convey the magic of that moment in time. Benny, I told myself sharply, stop wondering. It is not possible. Magic happens to you. When it does, be grateful and clutch it to your bosom. Don’t try to do the impossible with it. Magic cannot be passed on. All right, then. It happened to me. And here I was. Forty years later. In a hotel suite doctor’s office in Philadelphia. Remembering the magic. And feeling it again. A little bit, anyway. But it was enough. There had been only one Osgood Perkins.

  “Please sit down,” said Dr. McCarran. “And please try to relax. All men who come to see doctors in secret have things on their minds that they have not been able to tell their wives, and don’t want to. Clap?”

  The word hit me just as I sat down in front of Dr. McCarran’s desk.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “Clap,” Dr. McCarran said.

  I gave it a moment, then caught on. I was angry, but I knew I did not have the right to be.

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “It’s about my son.”

  “Sons, I have found, are more likely to suffer from the ailment than their fathers.”

  “No, that’s not what my son is suffering from,” I said. “If he were, I would be troubled, naturally, but I would not go to all this CIA subterfuge to arrange for his treatment. Our family doctor, Artie Steinberg, would know what to do.”

  “He would know better than most,” Dr. McCarran said. “Artie Steinberg and I rode a Bellevue ambulance together for two years after we got out of Cornell Med.”

  I stared at him with delight. You think of life as something lived in compartments. Then you run head on into a surprise. There really are no compartments. Everything runs into everything else, like pancakes poured too close together on a griddle.

  “Are you saying,” I said nervously, “that you know Dr. Arthur Steinberg of 435 East Fifty-seventh Street?”

  “New York, N.Y. 10022,” said Dr. Osgood Perkins.

  “Well,” Benny Kramer said. And that’s all he did say. Words—Miss Merle S. Marine probably would not believe this—words failed me. “He checked my blood pressure a week ago,” I said. “On East Fifty-seventh Street.”

  “So he told me,” Dr. McCarran said.

  Astonished, I said, “He did?”

  “Yes,” Dr. McCarran said. “Artie called to say you’d been in, and among other things you’d talked about your son, and while he said you hadn’t said anything, he suspected what you might do, and I’m the only man he knows who is capable of telling you what you want to know, so he called me here in Philadelphia and we talked about you. You’re taking two Aldomet tablets every morning, one every afternoon, and one at bedtime. Correct?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And one Esidrix every morning.”

  “Yes, of course,” Dr. McCarran said. “That’s for getting rid of the water in your system. We must get rid of the water, mustn’t we?”

  “I don’t know why,” I said, “but I do everything Artie Steinberg tells me to do.”

  “Very sound,” said Dr. McCarran. “Getting rid of the water is of the utmost importance.”

  “Well,” I said, “I seem to be doing it.”

  The conversation seemed at this point to fall apart. I did not know what Artie Steinberg had told him, but Dr. McCarran apparently did not believe that I had come to see him solely about Jack. I wondered if Artie thought I did not trust him and was checking on his medication with another doctor. Anyway, I liked Dr. McCarran, but I did not know how to handle this. Until Dr. McCarran said in a most friendly way, “You’ve been a friend to Sebastian Roon for a long time?”

  Light invaded the shaded room. Sebastian Roon is my oldest friend. That’s the truth. I am a bald-headed boy from East Fourth Street, later Tiffany Street, and my oldest friend is named Sebastian Roon. Can you beat it? If you can, please don’t tell me. We live by small bits of brightness. To me, for forty years, one of the brightest bits has been a man named, most improbably, Sebastian Roon. Don’t take it away from me.

  “Forty years,” I said. “We met when we were both seventeen. That’s forty years ago. He arranged this appointment, as you know.”

  “Indeed I do know,” said Dr. McCarran. “If he hadn’t, I’m afraid I would not have seen you. I met Seb during the war. He’s a great actor, I think. Don’t you?”

  I was not sure. Acting is a troubling art. It seems to me it’s largely an accident. If you have a face shaped in a certain way, if you bring out on the stage, or in front of a camera, an image that is sui generis, you are a great actor even if you are a dope. Sebastian Roon is no dope. And he is my friend. I knew what to say.

  “He is the greatest actor I have ever known,” I said.

  Safe enough. I have known only two actors. The other one may be greater than Sebastian. But he is a bastard. Nuts to him.

  “My wife will be pleased by your opinion,” said Dr. McCarran. “She is very fond of Seb.”

  The last wife who had not been fond of Seb was Anne of Cleves, and we all know what happened to her.

  “So is my wife,” I said. “That’s why I felt it was okay to come see you behind her back.”

  “It’s perfectly okay,” said Dr. McCarran. “I may not be the best doctor in the world, but I think I am about as good a friend as most human beings. I have never violated the confidence of a friend. You can ask Seb.”

  “I have,” I said. “He told me I can tell you anything.”

  “Then let me tell you what he told me,” said Dr. McCarran. “It may make things simpler, and probably speed them up. I understand you have to be in the Federal Courthouse on Walnut Street at two-thirty.”

  “Seb doesn’t seem to have left anything out,” I said.

  “Good actors rarely do,” said Dr. McCarran. “Here is what Seb told me. You have a son named Jack. He has just graduated from Harvard. He has gone to the University of Indiana to work for his masters in fine arts. His New York draft board has told him that they are forbidden to grant any more graduate school deferments. Your son Jack’s draft board told him before he went to Indiana that, if he did go, he would be in the Mekong Delta in three weeks. Is that correct?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “As Jack reported it to me, the draft board said two weeks.”

  “Close enough,” said Dr. McCarran.

  He lifted a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses that hung around his neck on one of those couturier braided ropes. He set the glasses on his nose, and looked at me exactly coldly but with a sort of clinical interest. As though up to now he had been going through a boring duty he had promised to go through for a friend, but now his own emotions had been engaged. My stomach reacted with a small tremor. He was Osgood Perkins!

  “This is obviously difficult for you,” Dr. McCarran said. “It’s easier for me. May I continue?”

  “Please,” I said.

  My mother did not learn English until I was almost eighteen. But she learned me my manners. In Yiddish. Thanks, Ma.

  “Seb says you don’t want that boy killed in the Mekong Delta,” Dr. McCarran said. “Is that correct?”

  I looked at him for a couple of moments. I decided that nothing would be gained by hitting him. Even though I knew just how to do it. Corporal Isherwood had taught me the blow during a commando course I had to take in Kent a month before D-day.

  “Strike for the bahstid’s jug,” Corporal Isherwood had barked at his dozen uneasy pupils. “It’s where these bahstids are vulnerable. Get them while they’re too confident to protect themselves. Make your choice. The nuts or the guts. The nuts is more decisive. But the guts is closer. Straighten you hand, palm flat, and swing like this, like you wuz cuttin’ the bahstid’s air flow. Which is what you’ll be doon. Easy. Sharp. Hard. That will take care of the bahstid.”

  I never got a chance to put Corporal Isherwood’s instructions into practice. By the time I got to Caen the bahstids were all running like crazy from Patton’s tanks. Just as well. I doubt that I could have done what Corporal Isherwood urge
d.

  So I said, as calmly as I could, to Dr. McCarran: “No, I don’t want that boy killed.”

  Dr. McCarran said, “Seb tells me he has told you in confidence about my service with the draft board during the last war.”

  “He has,” I said.

  “Please forgive the next question,” Dr. McCarran said. “Are we both agreed on the phrase ‘in confidence’?”

  The bahstids. Even the best of them. They had to close the shutters.

  “Completely,” I said. “Except for my wife and my son. I will have to tell them, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Dr. McCarran. “Okay, then. During the last war, I served as one of the chief medical advisers to General Hershey. The average citizen is quite savage about the draft. Understandably so. Since the days of Crassus nobody has looked with delight on a system that can take a son, a husband, a brother, a lover, perhaps even just a nice neighbor, from his normal routine and shove him into an enterprise where he may very probably get his head blown off, and often what gets blown off is worse than his head. Anyway, if you don’t look with delight on something, you begin inventing ways to circumvent it. The best way is to wet the bed.”

  “What?” I said. What would you have said?

  “The army does not like to draft men who wet their beds,” Dr. McCarran said.

  The effects of human speech are, of course, as unpredictable as the effects of nuclear fission. I have no doubt that to Dr. McCarran his simple statement was no more startling than the dropping of The Bomb over Hiroshima had been to the pilot of the Enola Gay. We were fighting a war. When you fight a war you have to win. The methods are not your concern. You just follow orders.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s wrong with wetting the bed?”

  Dr. McCarran gave me a look that had in it patience, because he was obviously a decent human being, but the look had in it also a number of not quite definable elements. They belonged to that area in which people with specialized knowledge, people like doctors, come to know so much about the human condition that they find it difficult to discuss the condition with even well-intentioned dumbbells.

  “There is nothing wrong with wetting the bed in a private bedroom,” Dr. McCarran said patiently. “In a barracks, however, a large chamber inhabited by dozens of men, wetting the bed is a disruptive act. It is a subject for ridicule. Ridicule destroys discipline. The army looks with disfavor upon the disruption of discipline. In fact, the army looks upon the destruction of discipline the way the priests of your race, Mr. Kramer, look upon the desecration of the Torah. The army wants men. But the army does not want men who wet their beds.”

  Another good thing about N.Y.U. Law School. It teaches you to put things together. It did in 1933-1937, anyway.

  “So if you tell the army you wet your bed,” I said, “the army will not draft you?”

  Dr. McCarran nodded. But I noticed his face looked troubled.

  “Not quite,” he said. “If to stay out of the army all a young man has to do is say he wets the bed, we would never have an army. It’s an easy lie. So the army employs doctors.”

  The troubled look cut deeper furrows into Dr. McCarran’s marvelous Osgood Perkins face.

  “I was one of those doctors,” he said. “The way I got to know Seb was that many actors, friends of his, wanted to stay out of the army, and they knew about the bed-wetting bit, but they didn’t know how to, how shall I put it, yes, they didn’t know how to activate it into plausibility.”

  I gave that a bit of thought. Dr. McCarran had obviously grown accustomed to visitors or patients who, at this point, needed a bit of thought. He pulled the fat silver stopper out of an expensive Abercrombie & Fitch thermos jug and poured himself a glass of ice water. He did not offer one to his visitor. I understood why he did not. At this point in a puzzling situation the visitor did not want ice water. Why waste time?

  “The problem, then,” I said, “would seem to be how to convince the army doctors, when a man says he wets his bed, how to convince the army doctors he is telling the truth. Is that correct?”

  Dr. McCarran was so clearly pleased with me, that I was pleased with myself.

  “Mr. Kramer,” he said, “you have not only put your finger on it. You have poked a hole right through it. Bull’s-eye!”

  “So you worked out a system,” I said. “How to check on men who say they wet their beds to find out if they are lying, or if they really do wet their beds.”

  “Precisely,” said Dr. McCarran. “I am not proud about this. But I wanted my country to beat the pants off a son of a bitch named Hitler. I hated that louse. I still do. I would have done anything to help. What I was able to do was track down poor kids who said they peed in bed but actually didn’t. Isn’t that insane?”

  I could see from his face that he intended it to be a serious question. I had come to him about a problem that had been shaking the hell out of me. I saw that in his attempt to help me solve it, I was shaking the hell out of him.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If you saved some kids from dying, it can’t be insane.”

  “Because you want me to save your son from dying,” Dr. McCarran said.

  He could have been behind the A&P counter asking me how many bunches of asparagus I wanted.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “I don’t want that kid to die. Any more than my parents wanted me to die in the war that was yours and mine. But my parents didn’t try to stop me. My mother and father would have considered it a dirty thing to do what I’m doing here today. You see, my mother and father were immigrants. They had escaped from Europe on the run. With murderous bastards like Hitler breathing down their necks. My mother and father made it. Others didn’t. My mother and father understood why it was necessary to fight savages like Hitler. They were proud to have their son in that fight. Their son is still proud that he was. But I’m not proud of this war. I’m ashamed of it. We’re not wiping out an evil like Hitler. This time we’re the evil. I don’t want my son to be a part of it. He’s going to die some day. Everybody dies, including you and me. But I’m damned if I’m going to let him die as a part of this plague. To save him from that I’ll do anything, Dr. McCarran.”

  Dr. McCarran stared at me for a moment, or a minute, or an hour. I don’t know. My heart was hammering so hard I couldn’t count time.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Sebastian Roon vouches for you.”

  “He is my son’s godfather,” I said.

  “Your son couldn’t have a better one,” Dr. McCarran said.

  He lifted the green blotter on his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was not a letterhead. Just a sheet of white paper. And I could see it had about twenty or thirty typewritten lines on it.

  “These are the questions I worked out during the crusade against Hitler,” he said. Not without irony. “To check the veracity of a boy who told his draft board doctor he peed in bed. And I’ve written down the answers. All your son has to do at his physical exam is rattle off these answers.”

  Osgood Perkins—no, sorry—Dr. McCarran bowed his head.

  “Christ Almighty,” he said to the green desk blotter. When he lifted his head, I was relieved to see he was not crying. “It’s a pretty rotten way to live,” he said. In a voice so low that I could only just barely hear him. But I did. “Teaching kids how to convince draft board doctors that they pee in bed. Wouldn’t that have made Osler proud of us?”

  I didn’t answer. I just took the sheet of paper, stood up, and went to the door. I made it because he held my elbow all the way.

  “Tell your son to memorize these simple questions and answers,” Dr. McCarran said. “He won’t be drafted.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I walked back to the Federal Courthouse. One of the most puzzling things about being alive, I have learned slowly, is that there are times when you don’t know what the hell is going on inside your own head. Emotions are too complicated to sort out. They make you feel rudderless. I hate that. I like
to feel I am in control. I like to feel I know where I am going. The infuriating truth is that I rarely do. For such moments I always carry the copy of Bleak House given to me by Miss Anna Bongiorno in J.H.S. 64 when I reached the semifinals in the New York Times oratorical contest on the Constitution in 1924. I did not make it into the finals, but I still have that copy of Bleak House. I never leave home without slipping it into my overnight bag. Even before I pack my razor and toothbrush.

  You can always, I have found, buy a toothbrush. Or find a barber. But copies of Bleak House, I have discovered, are difficult to come by on short notice. So I carry my own, and in spare moments away from home I lean on it. The book gets you through. Art always does. Good art, anyway, and Bleak House is up there with the best.

  It got me through a long wait in the Federal Courthouse on Walnut Street until I was called to the stand. After half an hour of foolish questions, Mr. Schlisselberger’s Philadelphia lawyer asked if I, as an experienced and well-known New York real-estate lawyer, would or could—no lawyer ever uses one word when two can be squeezed in—tell the court if any new theaters had been built in the Times Square area.

  “Not in my time,” I said.

  The defense attorney leaped to his feet. “And what, sir, if I may ask,” he thundered (he was a basso, like Ezio Pinza), “what is your time, sir?”

  Without thought, because it was simple fact, as much a part of my life as my home address, I said: “April fourth, nineteen thirteen, the day I was born, until today.”

  Pause. Defense attorney plops back into his seat, frowning furiously. I wonder why. The judge, a man who has hitherto been for me faceless, leans down from the bench. He proves to have a marvelous face. Plump, but not fat. Lined in a good way. The best way. Like a marbled steak. The lines underscoring the obvious fact that the face has been used. By thought. By worry. By preoccupation with the human condition, which is always troubling and never good. All these lines came together in a friendly smile, the whole head framed in a neatly tended mop of thick white hair.