Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  As I returned (Howie and the others present showing concerned faces, sensing a great emotional strain) Stu was saying, rhetorically, “Let me reiterate a fact well known to you all, the state of New York has three times as many physicians per capita as Minnesota, yet New Yorkers get sick more often and die younger, on the average, than Minnesotans.”

  Of course not everyone on the committee knew this, although I did: you don’t need doctors to be well, you need good genes and a good life style and self-fulfillment. That was the only serious challenge to my major thesis, and it was too bad that, in the projector of my brain, I couldn’t get the personal montage reel changed for the ‘beat Stu’s argument’ reel.

  I believe it was simple compassion that prompted the only dean who’d come himself and not sent a delegate, Dr. Rockwell of Presbyterian, to take on my former boss. He broke into the discussion with a great clearing of throat and pumping of shaggy gray eyebrows, saying, “Dr. Katz, don’t you think we can take this a step at a time? I don’t think a whole bunch of Norwegian farmers are going to migrate to the Bay Area before 1985, so, as a first step, let’s set a number for the future based on today’s patterns of practice. Then we can start arguing about what the appropriate standards of practice should be.”

  Stu countered, “But one of these days we’re going to be using lasers in eye surgery—they’re already experimenting with it—and that will make certain operations more feasible and therefore more accessible. It will radically change the practice of ophthalmology.”

  “Radically, Dr. Katz? In the whole Bay Area will it make a difference of as many as ten ophthalmologists? I’d guess ophthalmologists are like most surgeons I know, they aren’t busy enough. But Mr. Gattling can find that out” (he turned to address me) “can’t you, Mr. Gattling?”

  And this was my now-or-never cue—do it or go home.

  I turned off the montage. Like my shaggy-browed savior, I cleared my throat.

  six

  I said, “I can at least point out differences in productivity among ophthalmologists in different settings, and use them to make some explicit assumptions about unused capacity.”

  Dr. Rockwell made a gesture toward Stu Katz with head and hand which said, “You see?”

  At which point Stu, as I later explained to Mary Clare, became a bass rising to take a grasshopper as he said, “Ah, a range of numbers but no norm.”

  “Almost,” I said. “A range assumed to represent the number below which are too few, above which are too many, and a hint at where supply and demand seem to be in balance.”

  It didn’t matter that I’d violated my own rule about keeping the inquiry aimed at demand. The grasshopper had offered itself and I baited the hook with it. Stu Katz thought he had what he came for; the numbers didn’t seem to do what I had threatened they could, namely, tip off legislators to how to block future plans of the University.

  The meeting entered the stage where participants sang rondos of enthusiasm. Howie caught my eye and winked. Afterwards he said, “You pulled it off, you sonofabitch.”

  After a mumbled thanks to Dr. Rockwell, my brain refused to analyze. It groaned and stopped like the projector at the Northgate Theater used to in my undergraduate days. “I had a bad weekend, Howie.”

  I sketched my weekend.

  “Shit, we could have postponed this thing. You look like the wrath of God.

  “I was up all night.”

  “Sitting shiva, reciting the Psalms?”

  I said, “Screwing. It’s a great antidote for fear and loathing.”

  Howie hugged me, patted me on the back, and sent me home. I kept my eyes downcast and it was no different from the day my mother died, when I went out on the porch and found three of my chums—neighbor kids—who’d heard the ambulance in the night and, with children’s uninhibited curiosity, come over to get the skinny. I told them my mother’d died. One said, “Go on. Your mother died, you’d be bawling your eyes out.”

  In thirty years I had learned how to look as if I were about to bawl my eyes out. I searched out my staff, who’d sat on the periphery of the meeting, and we exchanged congratulations. One asked me how I did it. I told them I turned off my brain and just let it happen. It would be words for them to live by.

  *****

  I didn’t go straight home from the Claremont, I stopped in at Berkeley Square. The door was propped open. I heard the scrape of iron on brick, someone removing cold clinkers from the fire pit. Mac called out, “The usual, kid?”

  I said, spotting him among the shadows, “I’m just going to have a beer.”

  “Help yourself. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I went behind the bar and drew a schooner of lager. The only light came through the open door—I’d walked in on Mac’s heels.

  “What brings you in so early?” Mac asked, as he trundled the clinkers out to the curb.

  When he came back in I asked, “You ever have the feeling of life repeating itself, Mac?”

  “It usually does.” As he washed soot from his hands in the glass sink, a man slipped through the doorway, carrying a bag of produce. He bowed and clucked to Mac as he passed through to the kitchen.

  “See? Mr. Lee always comes in a few minutes after I do, he’s always carrying a bag of veggies, and he always smiles.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know,” Mac said.

  Mac took out from under the bar a much-handled photocopy that bore the title, “Rules for Living.”

  The first rule read, “There are only so many feelings. Every so often one comes along that is the same size, shape and duration as an important feeling from the past. Beware: Life is not repeating itself, because Life is not a feeling, only the world is.”

  “Wow, that’s heavy. Where’d you get it?”

  “Guy named Jake Pritchett.” This was the moment I learned that Mac knew Jake. It was like a Divine Accident, only I’d sworn off those.

  Reading my face, Mac said, “You know Jake.”

  “”Pretty well. And he just died. Saturday.”

  “Aw shit, what a shame. His ticker? I heard him once in here with his brother, talking about their mom dying of heart failure.”

  I polished off the beer. “Better make me a manhattan, Mac. —It was his heart, all right, but not the way you think. He got shot in the chest and there were complications.”

  “Shot?”

  “Don’t you read the papers, Mac? It was in all the dailies.”

  “I get my news on the radio in the morning and the TV at night. I skip all the stuff like that. Goddam, what bad luck.”

  He stirred the manhattan and poured it out into a frosted glass. “As I recall, you don’t do cherries.”

  I shook my head. After the first sip I said, “Funny, two places close to the campus serve liquor, he and I both came in here, I had to meet him in La Morinda. You say he has a brother. What’s he like?”

  “His name’s Bye and you can tell they’re brothers. Has a bit more hair than Jake, an inch or so taller, sounds like him. In fact, Jake told me he supplied the second rule, ‘You’ve only got one body. If it’s beautiful, don’t mess with it; if it’s not, don’t try to make up for it by marrying someone more beautiful than you.’

  “Jake didn’t follow that one too well, did he,” Mac concluded.

  The rule was also incomplete, in that it didn’t cover what you do if, beautiful or not, someone else messes with your body. That’s the problem with rules: they never cover every situation.

  “Damn. Was he in the hospital long?” Mac asked.

  I nodded. I’d drunk enough Mac poured a little extra from the shaker into my glass. I brought out a bill to cover the drinks and Mac waved it off.

  I remember when Mac got together a group to visit Buck Adams, another regular, who died of cirrhosis. He probably would have visited Jake, too, if he’d only known.

  “Thing I liked about Jake, he was a gentleman. He never got plastered, and I remember once he took the other Mac
home when he got pissed and was falling off his bar stool. Used to come in here with that wife of his, what a looker. Not too warm, but gorgeous.”

  “Amanda,” I said. “Yeah, she’s a looker.”

  “I saw him in here not too long ago, with a lady who by comparison was a dog—not ugly, just no style. You could tell she never read Cosmopolitan. They sat over there, by the fire. You know her?”

  I shook my head. “He mentioned her. Was there anything going on between them, could you tell?”

  Mac shrugged behind the bar. “Looked like a business thing, you know. Although she’s the type wouldn’t let on—cool in that respect.

  “Third rule: ‘Nobody owns tomorrow.’”

  “Jake lived up to that one.”

  “Wiry little guy like Jake, you’d think he’d live to ninety.”

  Two elderly women walked in and sat at the end of the bar closest the door. Mac turned on a couple of baby spots and went over to take their orders. I stood and said, “Let me pay for those, Mac.”

  He said, “Don’t insult me. And give my regards to the widow. Tell her she’s the best looking lady ever walked in this joint.”

  *****

  It was like I was eleven and walking out of the Loyola Theater after Saturday matinees, out of a dark place where you were deep in fantasy, into the real world of too-bright sun, hot concrete and automobile exhaust. I’d been in there chatting, showing a cool exterior, ready to go on to the next episode of Lash LaRue, even though, in the cliff hanger, the dynamite had exploded while Lash was still tied up in the mine tunnel.

  At home there was a note on the fridge (did she know I would go for a martini when I got home?) that read “Borrowed your bike to the library, M.”

  And then, while I was dunking a couple of olives in the martini, I heard her voice and then Mrs. Melnik’s voice, and I thought, That biddy better not come in here. And, as if to make sure she didn’t, I slipped off my shirt and put it in the laundry bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door. At last I heard conversation-ending tones, and Mary Clare walked in, wearing a pleased smile. She saw my bare chest and the martini in my hand and gave me a quizzical look.

  “Nobody owns tomorrow,” I said.

  “I’ve heard that,” she said.

  “It was Jake’s third rule for living.” I explained about Mac and the old photocopy.

  She said, “The nice part about that rule, Bobby, when you don’t have another tomorrow you either won’t know or won’t care.”

  I said, “I wasn’t worried about me.” A tear slid down my face.

  “You didn’t shoot him, Bobby, and you sure as hell didn’t give him an aneurism.”

  “I didn’t kill my mother, either.”

  Clare said, “Ah,” as if she’d put two and two together. She began to change her clothes.

  “Don’t just say ‘Ah,’ like you suddenly understand everything.”

  “You never told me about your mother’s death. I thought it was just the vagabond up in Nevada.”

  “It’s like a booby trap. A wire stretched between the two, a tripwire.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask ‘why.’ I was six. You think you make the whole world go ‘round when you’re six. I didn’t know what the fuck death meant, I just knew my mother wasn’t there and people told me she’d gone to heaven.”

  She was changing clothes. My eyes were drooping. Clouds were closing down on Berkeley and the ambiguity of autumn was upon the land.

  I said, “What were you doing at the library?”

  She said, her face lighting up, “I was bird watching.”

  “Huh?”

  “I was in the main reference room and I looked up to see these two pigeons flying high up, right under the vaulted ceiling. The man sitting next to me pulled out the Daily Californian and pointed out an article that said Stanford students had let them loose in there. They perched on the rods of those gigantic drapes, and after a while they flew the other way, side by side. They reminded me of us.”

  I drained my martini. I went for another and asked her if she’d care for one, and she shook her head. “They were totally futile up there, just surviving. Nothing they could do would please anyone more than just to fly from one end of the room to the other once in a while.”

  “That’s us?” I said.

  “I can’t explain it, but that’s us, Bobby, just a couple of birds sailing silently over all those scholars and their books.”

  Swing Low Sweet Chariot

  one

  The clothes Zev gave Mary Clare included enough black for a tasteful ensemble. Jim Rutledge told me later he was stunned by the sight of her. He had pictured her showing up in a poncho and peasant skirt, sandals and hairy legs. At the cemetery, when I introduced them and she exchanged with him the kind of words a genteel person would in that circumstance, I saw the prejudice melt with several brief shakes of his head, like a dog with a flea in his ear.

  The closest I could come to black was a charcoal gray suit, the one I’d hung onto from my assistant vice president days. It was no longer in fashion, but the differences from what Dean Acheson or Harry Belafonte were wearing just then would be lost on all but the women who read Men’s Vogue at the beauty parlor.

  The day itself dressed in autumn haze, a stubble burning day in the croplands of America: no wind blowing; hushed: earthquake weather. Driving to the chapel, listening to the car radio, it was hard to remember a real war continued out there, planes dropping mines in the harbors of a tiny enemy. George Wallace, shot within a week of Jake, issued a statement denouncing Nixon as a saboteur of democracy and George McGovern as the man who, despite Nixon’s unlawful assault on his campaign, would lead the country to a new morality. His impact on the election was doubtful, more doubtful since his endorsement was drowned out by Henry Kissinger’s “I believe peace is at hand.” As a footnote to history, the papers eulogized Charles Atlas, the original ninety-seven pound weakling. In my waning childhood I’d contemplated Atlas’s comic book ads and dreamt of becoming as brawny and powerful as John L. Sullivan.

  Somehow the word got out, as it does with funerals. There was a time when obituaries were printed so soon after death that funerals were announced in them, but by the time Jake died it was word of mouth. Amanda had Bienvenida call us, but I don’t know how Mac the bartender found out, nor the Melniks. Howie, of course, found out from me. Sergeant Rutledge had dropped in on Jake several times in the hospital. Rutledge respected Jake, for being in the military police, for standing up to him when Meany attacked me, for being my mentor. And Rutledge had his ear to the ground in Central County.

  Bienvenida brought her husband, José, and their children, Josecito and Maricia. She got as close as she could to funeral attire (her dress had little blue flowers on a black background) and let her husband do most of the talking, I suspect to keep from crying.

  Amanda’s brother was there, a man who looked so much like her they could have been twins. And Jake’s brother came, a taciturn man whose eyes held the sadness of the world but who shed not a tear.

  Unlike me. Rutledge saw me getting teary at the graveside and came over and put his big paw on my neck and whispered, “It’s rough, I know.” Giving me a shake that stopped the tears. When the interment was over he walked with Mary Clare and me towards the car. He took me aside and said, “I see her and I think, how many times in my life have I had the wind knocked out of my prejudices? There’s a God: I look at her and I know it. Jesus, kid, hang on to that one for dear life.”

  Growing up I remember how, in moments of profoundly missing my mother, I would imagine an interment for myself very different from hers or Jake’s. I would be sewn in a piece of sail cloth, like a seaman, but instead of being weighted and slipped into the sea, I would be slipped into a hole in the ground. Someone would plant a tree over me, and I would nourish it until everyone had forgot I was there.

  *****

  This is a pertinent lump of sentiment Jake taped after he sprang his deathb
ed wish on me, to finish the novel he started:

  I looked at Robert, holding my hand, silent tears running down his cheeks, and saw myself attending my mother’s deathbed on three separate occasions, her recovering twice. Each time I became a little more inured to a world without her, until the third time I went down to the cafeteria—I had sat there hours without smoking or eating or relieving myself—and came back to a flurry of activity in the room and the nurse said, “Her doctor’s on the way.”

  It was too late, she was already dead. The doctor was for the bureaucracy, to pronounce and to fill out the paperwork. I had missed the event I’d steeled myself for three times. Twice the miracle of modern medicine had postponed the inevitable. The third time she just slipped away while I was out getting a roast beef sandwich and a bowl of tapioca pudding with whipped cream.

  Too bad Robert’s mom couldn’t have skipped death until he was old enough to get his fill of her, given him a chance to get used to the idea of a world without her.

  I said, to comfort Robert, “Everyone has one Divine Accident in life, the same way everyone gets one simple-pretty. Mine is moving me on to unknown things—who knows if it’s a boon or not?”

  two

  I’ll let Jake introduce this final excerpt from his tapes:

  This is the unexpurgated Jake—last tape—the end of the Memoir of Bobwhite Court:

  As if everything stops when I do. I can’t imagine stopping—too much to live for. Quote: ‘I think, therefore I am immortal,’ versus, quote: ‘I think, therefore I dread death.’

  I’m a Polish Jew, clutching hope, like a siddur, to his bosom on the way to the gas chamber. I’m a smoke jumper trapped by wildfire, trying not to waste my breath.

  Knowing is worse than death. Ignorance and swift perishment are the profound wishes of Twentieth Century man.

  I know, therefore I’m paralyzed by anxiety.

  It isn’t the bullet or the aneurism that will get me, it’s genetics. “You gave me a bad ticker, Ma.”

  But that’s why we have Las Vegas, why I buy Irish Sweepstakes tickets every year. I have never won a football pool, but I entered every one that came along.