By one o’clock, after helping Freddy move the tables and get the bar ready, I was sitting on a stool sipping my second or third brandy and coffee and recalling the Counselor’s melancholy departure some weeks before, when Freddy suddenly pointed at my wallet, which lay open before me on the bar, and said, “Who’re the little guys?”
I told him they were my sons.
“Your sons?” he said. He was surprised, very surprised. His dark eyes widened exposing the whites, and his mouth went lax, forming a cavern of disbelief. “I didn’t know you were married.”
I told him my problem was that I hadn’t known it either.
He thought this witty and began to laugh. He was engaged in washing a great mass of dirty glasses from the night before. As his hand pumped up and down in the soapy water, he kept looking at me and smiling idiotically, waiting for me to tell him that it wasn’t true. I smiled, too. He had only known me as a drinker—practically a solitary one—with no life apart from booze and football. He was trying to get used to that part of me which existed away from The Parrot. Drying his hands, he walked down the bar to me and picked up the wallet again. He stared at the picture, then at me, then at the picture again, shaking his head in good-natured disbelief. Laying it down, he said, “Healthy little bastards, aren’t they?” I proudly agreed. He looked at me as though to say, “C’mon, who are they? Your nephews or who?” He seemed incredulous about this discovery. I just kept smiling. Then he began doing an imitation of me, one with which he often got laughs from the regulars in the place. I didn’t recognize it as resembling me. Dropping his eyelids to half-mast, and weaving slightly but steadily, he began talking in a dull monotone, slurring his words terribly and demanding from some imaginary bartender what time the Giants game went on. Then he began improvising. “I can see you ten years from now,” he said, “in some saloon waiting for the game to go on.” Now he picked up the wallet and went on with the imitation. Staggering down the bar, he pretended to be showing the picture to imaginary customers. “Dese here’s my sons,” he kept saying with pathetic insistence, pretending that the customers were intractable and finding this aspect of my life as hard to believe as he did. “Dey are,” he repeated to these phantom skeptics. “Dey are! Dey are! I ain’t lyin’ to yuh!” Abruptly Freddy fell to one side. Apparently one of those phantoms had brushed him rudely away, not really caring whether he had sons or not. We were alone in the bar, Freddy and I, and we laughed like hell, laughed and laughed and laughed.
But then, quite suddenly, quite frightfully, my laughter went cold in my stomach, and my joy and my exhilaration curdled to the point where I thought I might vomit. With a kind of omniscient clarity I suddenly recognized the truth of this vision. I saw myself some years hence, drunk, waiting “for the game,” without self-denial, without perseverance, without hope. In this vision there was nothing but dark rooms from which love and grace and charm were fled, and indeed —how very acute Freddy was!—all I had to cling to, yellowing now with age, was this fading photo of my twin sons, my only and final link with humanity, and one, at that, which people neither believed in nor really cared about. With this vision came alarming chills, then hot flashes. When my left arm went limp as pudding and the pain began shooting up and down it, when the symptoms became unmistakable, I struggled to my feet and without saying a word to Freddy walked down the half-dozen steps and went out into the sunshine It was silly—but I did not want to die there in the barroom.
Outside it was a lovely, thrilling autumn day. The sky was an unvarying, heady blue; as far as the eye could see—which from up on that hill was a long way—the fields were mottled with gold, the trees dripping with wine. I don’t know how long I just stood there, looking, waiting. My left leg had by now gone equally limp, followed by intermittent and excruciating pains in both arm and leg. I waited for one sharp explosion in my breast. If it had hit me then, I’d have died the way I had for a long time believed I could die, impenitent, chill of heart, unloving, unloved. But nothing happened except that the pain became even more unbearable, and I began, suddenly, to weep. Lifting my head, I stared, with my eyes wide-open, at the sun, hoping that its brilliant rays would not only obscure the lovely view but the pain and the memory. Still I lived, still I felt pain, and still time passed, so that each moment I lived only increased—in violent, mad proportions —my thirst for life. Suddenly I began to walk. I walked first tentatively, putting one foot slowly out before the other and dragging my left leg up to make its agonizing step, then faster, then furiously, round and round The Parrot’s macadam drive in a lunatic parody of life. Believing motion life, I felt as long as I moved I would have that life. As I moved I was still weeping profusely; scalding tears streamed down my cheeks, and all the time I called, if not to God, to the insidious and arbitrary forces of the universe—Oh, don’t let it be like this!
Not like this!—even attempting, in my fear, to bargain with that force, asking time for one more beer, time for one more game, time to get used to the notion of an eternity of darkness. “You son of a bitch!” I said. “I want to live!” With those words, spoken out of my mouth and into the brilliant November air, I struggled back up the stairs and into the bar, where I told Freddy I was sick and ought to go to the hospital. Freddy only looked at me and, seeing the large fear in my heart, threw on his coat and helped me back down the stairs and into his car. Together we started down the hill toward town.
Washington Street was as lovely as I had ever seen it. The houses looked formidably neat and snug, the immaculate lawns had their first tinges of lemon, the trees were shedding their multicolored leaves. Even up close it looked like some dream of place, and because I hated that place, I hated myself for having to seek its aid. Indeed, so much did it seem to me some place I had no right to be that it would not have surprised me had the city refused its aid. We were just turning into the House of the Good Samaritan’s drive when I said to Freddy, “I’m scared, Freddy—really scared.” Because he saw how afraid I was and it embarrassed him, Freddy didn’t say anything except, “Easy, boy—easy.”
Mrs. C., the on-duty nurse in the receiving room, was right out of Dickens, one of those eternal mothers, broad, sympathetic without being maudlin, and appallingly efficient, a woman whose very presence seems to heal. Listening to my choked, fearful complaints, she helped me off with my jacket and shirt and onto the hard, white-sheeted leather table, where she quickly and expertly took my blood pressure while the entire left side of my body went cold. Save for the terrifying palpitations of my heart, I might, I thought, have already been dead. I stared at her. She had a face made handsome by virtue of its very amiableness. But it told me nothing I searched and searched that face, but it revealed nothing of what that awesome gadget was telling her Finishing, she took a rather forbidding look at me and asked if I had a personal physician. When I said that I hadn’t, she told me a Dr. D. was on call and asked me if he would do. “Fine,” I said quickly. “Just fine.” How long it was before the doctor came, I can’t say. But I had never felt more alone, or more terrified, thinking still that the apocalyptic explosion in my breast was imminent. Both my arm and my leg were now all but immovable. My heart was beating violently, my head was throbbing. Propping myself up on my right elbow, I kept looking over my tensed feet at Mrs. C., who was sitting at a desk engaged in some paper work. I had to reassure myself that she was still there; over and over again I had to reassure myself. Though not once did she look in my direction, I had the feeling she knew I was watching her and that she expected me to speak. So I repeated my words to Freddy: “I’m afraid, Mrs. C.—really afraid.”
“Just lie still.”
“Look here,” I demanded, by now half crazy with fear and upset with what I interpreted as her dour indifference, “have I had—I mean, am I having some kind of attack?”
There was an agonizing pause while Mrs. C. obviously sought the tactful words. I wanted the answer because there were loose ends yearning for connections. One can imagine the kind of thing I wanted t
o say: “Look, if anything should happen, tell my mother I loved her—and my wife—well, tell her that in my way I loved—no, she won’t believe that. Tell her—well, tell her I’m sorry.” Had Mrs. C.’s reply been the expected one, how feeble, how hopelessly groping, these words would have come out! But Mrs. C., who had by now found her own words, saved me the embarrassment of mine; her reply made me feel foolish.
“Your blood pressure doesn’t indicate anything like an attack.” Once again, she paused, as if trying to find the right words. At the last moment she apparently decided against tact, no doubt thinking it would be wasted on me. “You’ve been drinking too much.”
“Drinking too much?” I said. “For Christ’s sake, you don’t mean to tell me that booze can do this?”
Mrs. C.’s reply came swiftly, and in its authority it was fierce. It was the reply of a woman who has seen all things, birth and death and pain unbearable, children maimed beyond recognition, the ravages of cancer; it was the voice of a woman who had seen, even where I now lay, God only knows what things that once had laughed and loved and danced the jig of life.
“And a lot worse, as you’ll damn well find out if you ever come in here with—” Here she mentioned the medical term for the massive stomach hemorrhages she had seen drinkers undergo.
For a moment I hated her for putting me down so peremptorily, and my first incredible thought was that she was trying to offer some stupid or misdirected comfort to the dying. I was perfectly aware that I was a paranoiac—which, of course, had caused the entire “seizure” to begin with—though instead of imagining people poisoning me, I suffered the suspicion that people were always trying to make me see things in a less complexly morbid light than I was wont to see them. No philosophy aroused shudders in me as quickly as “Oh, nothing’s that bad.” But this? Of course she wasn’t trying to console me. There had been no heart attack. Absolutely none.
“I feel foolish,” I said.
“None of that,” she said. “No reason for that. You’re sick. Just as sick as you can be.”
Before the doctor arrived, Mrs. C. and I had a few moments to talk. She asked me if I had ever thought of joining Alcoholics Anonymous. I told her that I had thought of it.
I could have told her that for a time, when I was incarcerated in the nuthouse, I had gone at the “request” of the authorities to the meetings of the hospital branch of that organization but that the “confessions” had embarrassed me; that, though AA professed to the contrary, it was evangelical in character; and that I could not bring myself to call daily upon God for help in abstaining, feeling that if there were a God I’d like to hold Him in reserve for more lovely mercies than my own sobriety. Quite frankly, it was more than this: I wasn’t sure I wanted to live without an occasional binge. But I couldn’t go into this with Mrs. C., knowing her argument would be that there was no such thing for me any more as an occasional binge. Though I respected the validity of this argument, it didn’t assuage my need for drink. After a month’s sobriety my faculties became unbearably acute and I found myself unhealthily clairvoyant, having insights into places I’d as soon not journey to. Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety. “You join it,” Mrs. C. said. As her tone signaled the end of the conversation, I fell to thinking about the “messages” I had wanted to leave behind. Had I loved my mother? My wife? At the existential moment I had wanted to believe that I had; but I could understand now, listening to my ever-quietening heart, that I had probably deceived myself into believing that I was still capable of love. More than anything I mourned the loss of this capacity. The realization of this loss suddenly made me want to weep again. I didn’t, though. I only bit my lip, very severely, and waited.
Dr. D. was a fine-looking man. In his middle or late forties, he was over six feet, graying, and he had an extremely handsome, open, and masculine-looking face. He seemed the kind of man to whom one would readily entrust one’s diseased and weary body. Dressed in a sport shirt, he looked anxious to get back to the easy comfort of his Sunday afternoon. He confirmed Mrs. C.’s diagnosis and came directly to the point. I was, he said, suffering from malnutrition aggravated by the alcohol which I had consumed the past two days. Did I, he wanted to know, have relatives in Watertown? I could not imagine why he wanted to know and said that I hadn’t. “That’s too bad,” he said, explaining that the alternatives were being released in the custody of a relative or his admitting me to the hospital for acute alcoholism. I said something to the effect that I doubted his authority to do this. His tone was firm, his manner unwavering, a kind of “try-me” posture. I gave Mrs. C. my sister’s telephone number. “That’s more like it,” he said, and smiled. Telling Mrs. C. that he wanted me to have sweet orange juice and to remain on the table until the arrival of my sister, he started for the door, stopped as though he meant to say something else, started again, stopped, and turned back to me.
“Earl Exley your father?” he said.
In Watertown it was a question that came to me frequently. Though my father had been dead for eighteen years, he had in his day been a superb athlete, as good, some say, as any who ever came out of northern New York—certainly no great distinction but not without its effect on a son who had never been permitted to forget it. Still, the question put in that place, at that time, struck me as funny, damned near hilarious, and I thought I was going to laugh aloud. I thought I was going to laugh from anticipation. Invariably the question was followed by the disclosure that the inquirer and my father, “Old Ex,” had played ball “together.” Certain that Dr. D.’s query was leading to this revelation, and trying not to smile, I said that Earl Exley had most certainly been my father. The doctor fooled me, though. All he said was, “He was a good fellow—a hell of a good fellow.” And, just before he went out the door, “And tough too!”
It was this latter that got to me, said as it was in such a way as to indicate that my father’s son might not be so tough. That got me thinking about having to face my sister, my kid sister at that. I tried to feel embarrassment. But it was no good. My life had been one long series of things imposed upon those closest to me; having faced the reproachful and pained eyes of relatives so many times before, I couldn’t really summon up the shame I thought I ought to feel at such a confrontation with her.
My brother-in-law came for me. He was a good guy and tried to make it easy. Laughing uncertainly, he said, “What the hell’s going on? You don’t look stinko to me.” I said, “I’m not.” Rising, I put on my shirt and jacket and turned to Mrs. C. She looked directly at me. “You think over what I told you,” she said. I promised I would, and then I apologized again, mumbling the words. She said, “Oh, posh,” and waved me off. I wanted to say something else, something definite, but it eluded me. In the embarrassing lapse my brother-in-law said, “C’mon, c’mon, we’re missing the Giants game!” To which I laughed and exclaimed, “Jesus, yes,” though for the first time in years I didn’t at all care.
2/ Cheers for Stout Steve Owen
When Steve Owen, who coached the New York Giants from 1931 through 1953, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his home in Oneida, New York, I debated for a day whether to make the trip south for the funeral. For a long time I had felt that I owed Owen such homage, and I’d never again be able to pay it. Envisioning the scene, I saw myself a kind of Owl-Eyes come to Gatsby’s wake, a little aloof, sequestered from the one or two mourners, a curiosity weeping great, excited tears in the blue shade of funereal elms. The vision was as close as I came to such demonstrativeness.
In the hours after his death the newspapers began to name the many sports dignitaries who were to make their own pilgrimages to Oneida, the funeral began to assume the hues of an obligatorily festive occasion, and I sensed that genuine grief would be distasteful in such surroundings. I did write a note to Owen’s widow. Quoting Brutus on Cassius (I have said that I teach English—peda
gogically, I might add), I wrote with a tense, forced hand, I owe more tears to this dead man than you shall see me pay. Appearing over a signature she wouldn’t recognize, the message, it occurred to me, was not only pretentious but might bewilder and embarrass Mrs. Owen. In the end I did nothing to help put the ghost on its way. I had wanted to make the pilgrimage because it was Owen, as much as any other, who had brought me round to the Giants and made me a fan. Unable to conceive what my life would have been without football to cushion the knocks, I was sure I owed him sorrow. It occurs to me now that my enthusiasms might better have been placed with God or Literature or Humanity; but in the penumbra of such upper-case pieties I have always experienced an excessive timidity rendering me tongue-tied or forcing me to emit the brutal cynicisms with which the illiterate confront things they do not understand.
In the hot summer of 1953, after spending three unrewarding years (popping Benzedrine tablets into my mouth, I recall the shiver-inducing snap and crack of new texts opened for the first time on the eve of final examinations) at the University of Southern California, I returned east to New York, an A.B. in English my portfolio, a longing in the heart the clue to my countenance. What did I long for? At twenty-three, I of course longed for fame. Not only did I long for it, I suffered myself the singular notion that fame was an heirloom passed on from my father. Dead at forty, which never obviates the stuff of myths, my father acquired over the years a nostalgic eminence in Watertown; and, like him, I wanted to have my name one day called back and bantered about in consecrated whispers. Perhaps unfairly to him (I have his scrapbooks and know what admirable feats are inventoried there), I’m not sure my father’s legend was as attributable to his athletic prowess as to his personality. The tales men selected to pass on about him were never so much about a ninety-yard run as about an authentically colorful man having a ball and in an amiable way thumbing his nose at life.
A Fan's Notes Page 3
