by Philip Roth
"Please do. When you talk about him, it's as if he's still here," Gwen said.
"Well, there was the time when we worked and worked every night for two or three weeks until after midnight, sometimes until two or three in the morning, for the Mercedes-Benz pitch. This was really one of the big ones, and we worked like hell, and we didn't get it. But when it was over Clarence said to me, 'I want you and your wife to go to London for a long weekend. I want you to stay at the Savoy because it's my favorite hotel, and I want you and Phoebe to have dinner at the Connaught. And it's on me.' In those days, this was a huge gift, and he gave it even though we'd lost the account. I wish I could have told that to the papers, and all the stories like it."
"Well, the press has been superb," Gwen said. "Even up here. There was an article about him in today's Berkshire Eagle. It was long, with a wonderful picture, and very laudatory. They made much of what he'd done in the war and about his being the army's youngest full colonel. I think Clarence would have been amused and contented by the recognition he's gotten."
"Look, you sound, for the moment, okay."
"Well, of course, it's okay now—I'm busy and I've got lots of company. The hard part is going to be when I'm alone."
"What are you going to do? Are you going to stay on in Massachusetts?"
"Yes, I am, for now. I discussed it with Clarence. I said, 'If I'm the one who's left, I'm going to sell the house and go back to New York.' But the kids want me not to do that, because they think I ought to give myself a year."
"Probably they're right. People regret, sometimes, the actions they take right off."
"I think so," she said. "And how is Nancy?"
"She's fine."
"Whenever I think of Nancy as a child, a smile comes to my face. She was pure life. I remember the two of you singing 'Smile' together at our house. We were living in Turtle Bay. It was an afternoon so long ago. You'd taught it to her. She must have been all of six. 'Smile, tho' your heart is aching'—how does it go?—'smile even tho' it's breaking—' You bought her the Nat 'King' Cole record. Remember? I do."
"I do too."
"Does she? Does Nancy?"
"I'm sure she does. Gwen, my heart and thoughts are with you."
"Thank you, dear. So many people have called. The phone has been going steadily for two days. So many people have wept, so many people have told me what he meant to them. If Clarence could only see all this. He knew his value to the company, but you know he also needed the same reassurances that everyone needs in this world."
"Well, he was awfully important to all of us. Look, we'll talk more," he said.
"Okay, dear. I so appreciate your calling."
It took him a while to go back to the phone with a voice he could trust. Brad Karr's wife told him the Manhattan hospital where Brad was a psychiatric patient. He was able to dial Brad's room directly, remembering as he did the time they'd done that slice-of-life commercial for Maxwell House coffee, when they were kids in their twenties, just starting out together, teamed up as a copywriter and an art director, and they broke the bank on the day-after recall score. They got a 34, the highest score in the history of Maxwell House. It was the day of the group Christmas party, and Brad, knowing Clarence would be coming, had his sidekick make cardboard buttons saying "34," and everybody wore them, and Clarence stopped by just to congratulate Brad and him and even put on a button, and they were on their way.
"Hello, Brad? Your old buddy calling from the Jersey Shore."
"Hi. Hello there."
"What's up, kid? I called your house a few minutes ago. I just had a yen to talk to you after all this time, and Mary told me you were in the hospital. That's how I've reached you. How are you doing?"
"Well, I'm doing all right. As such things go."
"How are you feeling?"
"Well, there are better places to be."
"Is it awful?"
"It could be worse. I mean, this happens to be a pretty good one. It's okay. I don't recommend it for a holiday, but it's been all right."
"How long have you been there?"
"Oh, about a week." Mary Karr had just told him that it had been a month at this point, and that it was his second stay in a year, and that things hadn't been so great in between. Brad's speech was very slow and faltering—probably from the medication—and heavy with hopelessness. "I expect I'll be out soon," he said.
"What do you do all day?"
"Oh, you cut out paper dolls. Things like that. I wander up and down the hallways. Try to keep my sanity."
"What else?"
"Take therapy. Take drugs. I feel like I'm a depository for every drug you can name."
"In addition to the antidepressant, there's other stuff?"
"Yeah. It's mostly a downer. It's not the tranquilizers, it's the antidepressants. They're working, I think."
"Are you able to sleep?"
"Oh yeah. At first there was a little problem, but now they've gotten that part straightened out."
"Do you talk to a doctor during the day?"
"Yeah." Brad laughed, and for the first time sounded something like himself. "He doesn't do any good. He's nice. He tells you to buck up and everything's going to be all right."
"Bradford, remember when you were pissed at Clarence about something and gave him two weeks' notice? I told you not to leave. You said, 'But I've resigned.' 'Rescind your resignation,' I said. And you did. Who else but Clarence and what other agency would have put up with that crap from a copywriter? You did it twice, as I remember. And stayed another ten years."
He'd gotten Brad to laugh again. "Yeah, I was always nuts," Brad said.
"We worked together for a lot of years. Endless silent hours together, hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands and thousands of silent hours together in your office or mine trying to figure things out."
"That was something," Brad said.
"You bet it was. You were something. And don't forget it."
"Thanks, buddy."
"And so what about leaving?" he asked Brad. "When do you think that's going to happen?"
"Well, I don't really know. I imagine it's a matter of a couple of weeks. Since I've been here I've been far less depressed than when I was out. I feel almost composed. I think I'm going to recover."
"That's good news. I'll call you again. I hope to speak to you under better circumstances very shortly."
"Okay. Thanks for calling," Brad said. "Thanks a lot. I'm awfully glad you called."
After hanging up, he wondered: Did he know it was me? Did he truly remember what I remembered? From the voice alone I can't imagine he'll ever get out of there.
Then the third call. He couldn't stop himself from making it, though learning of Brad's hospitalization and Clarence's death and seeing the damage caused by Phoebe's stroke had given him enough to ponder for a while. As did Gwen's reminding him of his teaching Nancy to sing "Smile" like Nat "King" Cole. This call was to Ezra Pollock, who wasn't expected to live out the month but who, astonishingly, when he answered the phone, sounded like someone happy and fulfilled and no less cocky than usual.
"Ez," he said, "what's cookin'? You sound elated."
"I rise to conversation because conversation is my only recreation."
"And you're not depressed?"
"Not at all. I don't have time to be depressed. I'm all concentration." Laughing, Ezra said, "I see through everything now."
"Yourself included?"
"Yes, believe it or not. I've stripped away my bullshit and I'm getting down to brass tacks at last. I've begun my memoir of the advertising business. Before you go, you've got to face the facts, Ace. If I live, I'll write some good stuff."
"Well, don't forget to include how you'd walk into my office and say, 'Okay, here's your panic deadline—first thing tomorrow I need that storyboard in my hand.'"
"It worked, didn't it?"
"You were diligent, Ez. I asked you one time why that fucking detergent was so gentle to a lady's delicate hands. You gave me
twenty pages on aloes. I got the art director's award for that campaign, and it was because of those pages. It should have been yours. When you get better we'll have lunch and I'll bring you the statue."
"That's a deal," Ez said.
"And how's the pain? Is there pain?"
"Yes, there is, I have it. But I've learned how to handle it. I've got special medicines and I've got five doctors. Five. An oncologist, a urologist, an internist, a hospice nurse, and a hypnotist to help me overcome the nausea."
"The nausea from what, from therapy?"
"Yeah, and the cancer gives you nausea too. I throw up liberally."
"Is that the worst of it?"
"Sometimes my prostate feels like I'm trying to excrete it."
"Can't they take it out?"
"It wouldn't do any good. It's too late for that. And it's a big operation. My weight is down. My blood is down. It would make me so weak and I'd have to give up the treatment, too. It's a big lie that it moves slowly," Ezra said. "It moves like lightning. I didn't have anything in my prostate in the middle of June, but by the middle of August it had spread too far to cut it out. It really moves. So look to your prostate, my boy."
"I'm sorry to hear all this. But I'm glad to hear that you sound as you do. You're yourself, only more so."
"All I want is to write this memoir," Ez said. "I've talked about it long enough, now I have to write it. All that happened to me in that business. If I can write this memoir, I will have told people who I am. If I can write that, I'll die with a grin on my face. How about you, are you working happily? Are you painting? You always said you would. Are you?"
"Yes, I do it. I do it every day. It's fine," he lied.
"Well, I could never write this book, you know. Once I retired I immediately had blocks. But as soon as I got cancer most of my blocks fell away. I can do whatever I want now."
"That's a brutal therapy for writer's block."
"Yeah," Ez said, "I think it is. I don't advise it. You know, I may make it. Then we'll have that lunch and you'll give me the statue. If I make it, the doctors say I can have a normal life."
If he already had a hospice nurse, it seemed unlikely that the doctors would have said such a thing. Though maybe they had to lift his spirits, or maybe he'd imagined they had, or maybe it was just arrogance speaking, that wonderful, ineradicable arrogance of his. "Well, I'm rooting for you, Ez," he said. "If you should want to speak to me, here's my number." He gave it to him.
"Good," Ezra said.
"I'm here all the time. If you feel in the mood, do it, call me. Anytime. Will you?"
"Great. I will."
"All right. Very good. Bye."
"Bye. Bye for now," Ezra said. "Polish up the statue."
For hours after the three consecutive calls—and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues' lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up the hopeless and bring them back from the brink—what he wanted to do was not only to phone and speak to his daughter, whom he found in the hospital with Phoebe, but to revive his own esprit by phoning and talking to his mother and father. Yet what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
When he next went to the hospital for the annual checkup on his carotids, the sonogram revealed that the second carotid was now seriously obstructed and required surgery. This would make the seventh year in a row that he would have been hospitalized. The news gave him a jolt—particularly as he'd heard by phone that morning of Ezra Pollock's death—but at least he would have the same vascular surgeon and the operation in the same hospital, and this time he would know enough not to put up with a local anesthetic and instead to ask to be unconscious throughout. He tried so hard to convince himself from the experience of the first carotid surgery that there was nothing to worry about, he did not bother to tell Nancy about the pending operation, especially while she still had her mother to tend to. He did, however, make a determined effort to locate Maureen Mrazek, though within only hours he had exhausted any clues he might have had to her whereabouts.
That left Howie, whom by then he hadn't phoned in some time. It was as though once their parents were long dead all sorts of impulses previously proscribed or just nonexistent had been loosed in him, and his giving vent to them, in a sick man's rage—in the rage and despair of a joyless sick man unable to steer clear of prolonged illness's deadliest trap, the contortion of one's character—had destroyed the last link to the dearest people he'd known. His first love affair had been with his brother. The one solid thing throughout his life had been his admiration for this very good man. He'd made a mess of all his marriages, but throughout their adult lives he and his brother had been truly constant. Howie never had to be asked for anything. And now he'd lost him, and in the same way he'd lost Phoebe—by doing it to himself. As if there weren't already fewer and fewer people present who meant anything to him, he had completed the decomposition of the original family. But decomposing families was his specialty. Hadn't he robbed three children of a coherent childhood and the continuous loving protection of a father such as he himself had cherished, who had belonged exclusively to him and Howie, a father they and no one else had owned?
At the realization of all he'd wiped out, on his own and for seemingly no good reason, and what was still worse, against his every intention, against his will—of his harshness toward a brother who had never once been harsh to him, who'd never failed to soothe him and come to his aid, of the effect his leaving their households had had on his children—at the humiliating realization that not only physically had he now diminished into someone he did not want to be, he began striking his chest with his fist, striking in cadence with his self-admonition, and missing by mere inches his defibrillator. At that moment, he knew far better than Randy or Lonny ever could where he was insufficient. This ordinarily even-tempered man struck furiously at his heart like some fanatic at prayer, and, assailed by remorse not just for this mistake but for all his mistakes, all the ineradicable, stupid, inescapable mistakes—swept away by the misery of his limitations yet acting as if life's every incomprehensible contingency were of his making—he said aloud, "Without even Howie! To wind up like this, without even him!"
At Howie's ranch in Santa Barbara there was a comfortable guest cottage nearly as large as his condo. Years back he, Phoebe, and Nancy had stayed there for two weeks one summer while Howie and his family were vacationing in Europe. The pool was just outside the door, and Howie's horses were off in the hills, and the staff had made their meals and looked after them. Last he knew, one of Howie's kids—Steve, the oceanographer—was temporarily living there with a girlfriend. Did he dare to ask? Could he come right out and tell his brother that he'd like to stay at the guest house for a couple of months until he could figure out where and how to live next? If he could fly out to California after the surgery and enjoy his brother's company while beginning to recover...
He picked up the phone and dialed Howie. He got an answering machine and left his name and number. About an hour later he was called by Howie's youngest son, Rob. "My folks," Rob said, "are in Tibet." "Tibet? What are they doing in Tibet?" He believed they were in Santa Barbara and Howie just didn't want to take his call. "Dad went on business to Hong Kong, I believe to a board meeting, and my mother went with him. Then they went off to see Tibet." "Are Westerners allowed in Tibet?" he asked his nephew. "Oh, sure," Rob said. "They'll be gone another thr
ee weeks. Is there a message? I can e-mail them. That's what I've been doing when people call." "No, no need," he said. "How are all your brothers, Rob?" "Everybody's doing okay. How about you?" "I'm coming along," he said, and hung up.
Well , he was thrice divorced, a one-time serial husband distinguished no less by his devotion than by his misdeeds and mistakes, and he would have to continue to manage alone. From here on out he would have to manage everything alone. Even in his twenties, when he'd thought of himself as square, and on into his fifties, he'd had all the attention from women he could have wanted; from the time he'd entered art school it never stopped. It seemed as though he were destined for nothing else. But then something unforeseen happened, unforeseen and unpredictable: he had lived close to three quarters of a century, and the productive, active way of life was gone. He neither possessed the productive man's male allure nor was capable of germinating the masculine joys, and he tried not to long for them too much. On his own he had felt for a while that the missing component would somehow return to make him inviolable once again and reaffirm his mastery, that the entitlement mistakenly severed would be restored and he could resume where he'd left off only a few years before. But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was—the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know.
The man who swam the bay with Nancy's mother had arrived at where he'd never dreamed of being. It was time to worry about oblivion. It was the remote future.
One Saturday morning less than a week before the scheduled surgery—after a night of horrible dreaming when he'd awakened struggling to breathe at three A.M. and had to turn on all the lights in the apartment to calm his fears and was only able to fall back to sleep with the lights still burning—he decided it would do him good to go to New York to see Nancy and the twins and to visit Phoebe again, who was now at home with a nurse. Normally his deliberate independence constituted his bedrock strength; it was why he could take up a new life in a new place unconcerned over leaving friends and family behind. But ever since he'd abandoned any hope of living with Nancy or staying with Howie, he felt himself turning into a childlike creature who was weakening by the day. Was it the imminence of the seventh annual hospitalization that was crushing his confidence? Was it the prospect of coming steadily to be dominated by medical thoughts to the exclusion of everything else? Or was it the realization that with each hospital stay, going back to childhood and proceeding on up to his imminent surgery, the number of presences at his bedside diminished and the army he'd begun with had dwindled to none? Or was it simply the foreboding of helplessness to come?
