“Lincoln’s deathbed physician said he had the body of a Moses. What do I look like, Bill?”
The doctor, who had just finished examining my father, dropped the covers. He said, “You can’t put off that quadruple forever.”
“Isn’t that where you take strips from my ass and sew them to my heart? You keep chopping bits off me, Bill. Christ, what am I going to have left, one nut and my elbow?”
The doctor smiled coldly and put his hat on. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, and left.
The sick room, the whole house, smelled of turkey and onions. Bernard breathed in slowly. “My seventy-first Turkey Day. Whoopy do.” He turned to me, grinning slyly. “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen helping your mother?”
“She isn’t my mother,” I said, “she’s your doxy. She can’t be my mother. She’s twenty-eight. I’m twenty-nine. Remember?”
My father looked at me with interest. “You almost said that as though you minded.”
My mother, my real mother, is sixty. Her name is Josephine. She is so short that my father, during his affectionate years, used to call her Runtkin. She gardens all the time, wearing rumpsprung corduroys, although when caught up in the excitement of the growing season she’s been known to weed at dawn in her nightie. My mother smells of cool ferny soaps, except on the days when she doses her plants with fish emulsion. She reads for hours every night, mostly Shakespeare. She rarely understood a joke in her life, and my father, who was a stand-up comedian for forty years, said that in the end that was why he divorced her. Actually he was looking for Shirleen, or someone like Shirleen.
Shirleen is my stepmother. Her bulgy curves spring in and out under shiny fabrics printed with tiger stripes and jungle flowers. She smells of perfume with violent police-blotter names: Assault, Love Jump, Drug Delirium. When my father introduced her to me, secretly he lifted his eyebrows and shrugged a little.
“What can I do?” he said to me later. “I like it like that.”
My mother took the divorce quite well, although initially she was confused at being told that their marriage was terrible. “I thought it was rather nice,” she told me hesitatingly, in her gentle voice. I knew what she meant. She thought it was nice because to her, the marriage included everything she cared about. First of all there was me, Rochelle. I’m a cartoonist, sometimes even referred to in national publications as “rising.” She also included the big garden, the prize legumes with their roots going clear to China. Josephine counted the kitchen, and every meal she and Bernard had shared, from the wedding banquet crown roast and pink Lady Baltimore cake to the driest heel of rye, old maids in the popcorn pot. She’d thought the marriage had music. She would always listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast Saturday afternoons. My father liked jazz, and Coleman Hawkins would cool up the living room around midnight. My mother counted everything, and that is where she went wrong. She mistook her life for her marriage. People do this, but it’s the surest way I know to get your face stepped on.
“Hey,” I said now to Bernard, craftily shifting ground. “Did I show you the cartoon New York Magazine bought?” I reached into my portfolio. “They’re asking me if I’ll do a series on this couple.” I put the drawing in his hand. He studied it silently. The cartoon showed a man and woman in colonial dress. The man was very tall and had my father’s face, with a stupid expression. The woman was very short and looked like my mother. She had her hands on her hips and was saying, “Well, one thing I know for sure, bud. From my heart will grow a red, red rose, and from yours, a briar.”
Bernard, whose nickname is Bud, looked stone-faced at the cartoon for a long minute. Then he gave his short, harsh laugh. He always laughed this way at my cartoons, grudgingly, as though the laughter had been extorted from him with menaces.
“Right,” he said, “and from my back will grow the knives you keep planting in it. I sent you to that fancy art school and you got good, good enough to humiliate me nationally. Hell, you’re a gifted little shit. Maybe someday you’ll humiliate me internationally.”
“It’s what I aim toward,” I said. “But cheer up. Think of it this way. If I’m good, at least you got your money’s worth from the art school.”
“Oh, did I?” he said, staring at the cartoon in his hand. “Right. What a sweet deal for me.” There was a pause, and then he said, “I’m a little surprised you decided to spend Thanksgiving with the old goat and his doxy.”
“Mother said she wasn’t going to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.”
There was a silence, during which we both visualized Thanksgiving the year before. Josephine had been up at dawn, stuffing a turkey the size of a pony and filling the house with bouquets, some in old milk bottles and blue quart jars, and others in Waterford goblets.
In one instant the memory turned us both furious, short of breath.
“You blame me,” my father said, “God damn it.”
“I blame you because you’re to blame. You evicted her—”
“It was better not to drag it out. Sometimes it’s necessary to be cruel to be kind—”
“This whole concept of necessary cruelty really fascinates me. Take this year.” I spoke in a soft, innocent voice, as though I couldn’t taste smoking chunks of his guilty heart. “When you half-killed Mom by shoving her out of her own home, it was really all for her own good. Silly old Mom, if only she’d known.”
“That apartment is a palace, she’s living like a queen, I’m paying a fucking fortune—” By this time he was yelling, climbing out of bed and waving his cane. I knew he wouldn’t hit me, he never had. “You’re lying,” he shouted, “you’re lying like a rug,” and as I dodged the cane without effort, I studied the eggplant-purple of his face. I always could jump-start the old man into near insanity. On the other hand, I didn’t want him to drop dead on me. I held my hand up in a truce. Gasping, he collapsed back on his pillow. For a full minute there was no sound in the room except my father mastering his breath. He made no attempt whatever to hide his terribly working face. His eyes were fixed on me, and neither of us blinked. Finally he spoke.
“Go ahead, pour it out, swill it all over me,” he assumed a weary burlesque of my face and tone, a sniveling, snot-nosed crybaby, “how I faaiii-iled you and faaiii-iled your mother and flushed her whole life down the toilet. Well, you know what? Things are tough all around. Personally, I like having a wife who doesn’t wander around outside in her underwear, talking to herself—”
“Your property has a wall around it, nobody saw her! She was wearing that flannel granny gown, it covers her from head to toe, and she was reciting sonnets from Shakespeare—”
“Well, whatever,” he said. “It gave me the creeps. Then there was always the goddamned second cousin hanging around. Who ever asked him? I never did.”
“Edward has been her best friend all her life,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, what could be more pathetic than that? The truth is, I’m happy now, and she could be happy if she tried. She refuses.”
I said, “You talk about her as if she’s some old cow who won’t let her milk down.”
He smiled slightly and spread his hands, as though to say, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but …