In Pharaoh's Army (20 page)

I
GOT TO
Manhattan Beach just after sundown and surprised my father once again. He was in his bathrobe, about to pop some frozen horror into the oven. I told him to keep it on ice and let me stand him to dinner at the restaurant where we’d eaten the year before. He said he wasn’t feeling exactly jake, thought he might be coming down with something, but after we had a few drinks he let himself be persuaded of the tonic potential of a night on the town.

So we gave it another try, and this time we got it right. Again we stuffed ourselves with meat and drink, and again my father grew immense with pleasure and extended his benevolence to everyone in range. The old rich rumble entered his voice; the stories began, stories of his youth and the companions of his youth, rioters whose deeds succeeded in his telling to the scale of legend. He found occasion to invoke the sacred names (Deerfield; New Haven; Bones; the Racquet Club), but this time I managed to get past the lyrics and hear his music, a formal yet droll music in which even his genuine pretensions sounded parodic. I asked no questions about Hadassah. I let him roll. In fact I
egged him on. I didn’t have to believe him; it was enough to look across the table and see him there, swinging to his own beat.

I had come back to Manhattan Beach, I surely understood even then, because there could no longer be any question of judgment between my father and me. He’d lost his claim to the high ground, and so had I. We could take each other now without any obligation to approve or disapprove or model our virtues. It was freedom, and we both grabbed at it. It was the best night we’d ever had.

I paid the next morning. So did he, and then some. Late into the day he was still in bed, flushed and hot, and I finally realized that he really had been coming down with something. I called his doctor, who stopped by the apartment on his way home that evening, diagnosed the flu, and prescribed something to bring the fever down. He wouldn’t let me pay, not after my father sneaked it in that I was just back from Vietnam. I followed the doctor to the door, insisting, wagging my wallet, but he wouldn’t hear of it. When he left I went back to the old man’s bedroom and found him laughing, and then I started laughing too. Couple of crooks.

That night and the next day he was too sick to do much of anything but sleep. In his sleep he moaned and talked to himself. I came into his room now and then and stood over him in the dim slatted light cast by the streetlamp. Big as he was, he looked as if he’d been toppled, felled. He slept like a child, knees drawn up almost to his chest. Sometimes he whimpered. Sometimes he put his thumb in his mouth. When I saw him like that he seemed much older than his sixty
years, closer to the end and more alone than I wanted to think about.

Then he started coming out of it. He liked being babied, so he wore his invalid droop and mopery as long as I let him. When I helped him in and out of bed he groaned and mewed and walked as if his joints had rusted shut. He had me buy him an ice bag, which he wore like a tam-o’-shanter, his eyes tremulous with self-pity. All day long he called out his wishes in a small desolate voice—cheese and crackers, please, some Gouda on stone-ground Wheat Thins would be swell, with a little Tabasco and red onion, if I wouldn’t mind. Palm hearts with cream cheese,
por favor
, and this time could I skip the paprika and just sprinkle a little onion salt on them? Thanks a mil! Ginger ale, old son, over ice, and would it be too much trouble to
crush
the ice?

He was relentless and without shame. Once he pushed me too far and I said, “Jesus, Duke, suffer in silence awhile, okay?” This was the first time in my life I’d called him by that name, and the sound of myself saying it made me cringe. But he didn’t object. It probably reassured him that I was ready to vacate any outstanding claims on him as his child and accept a position as his crony. I never called him Duke again. I wanted to feel as if I still had a father out there, however singular the terms.

He started feeling better after the second day, and I was almost sorry. I liked taking care of him. I’d blitzed the apartment with cleansers, stocked his cabinets with cans of stew and hash and clam chowder and the treats he favored—Swedish flatbread, palm hearts, macadamia nuts. I had a new muffler put on the Cadillac. While he was laid up sick the smallest acts felt purposeful
and worthwhile, and freed me from the sodden sensation of uselessness. Out running errands, I found myself taking pleasure in the salt smell and hard coastal light, the way the light fired the red-tiled roofs and cast clean-edged shadows as black as tar. In the afternoons I brought a chair and a book out to the sidewalk and faced the declining sun, chest bared to the warmth, half listening for the old man’s voice through the open window at my back. I was reading
Portnoy’s Complaint
. Geoffrey had sent it to me some time before and I’d never been able to get past the first few pages, but now it came to life for me. I read it in a state of near collapse, tears spilling down my cheeks. It was the first thing I’d finished in months.

My father took note of my absorption. He wanted to know what was so fascinating. I let him have it when I was through, and that evening he told me he’d never read anything so disgusting—not that he’d finished it. Come on, I said. He had to admit it was funny. Funny! How could such a thing be funny? He was baffled by the suggestion.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you think
is
funny, then?”

“What b-book, you mean?”

“Book. Movie. Whatever.”

He looked at me suspiciously. He was stretched out on the couch, eating a plate of scrambled eggs.
“Wind in the Willows,”
he said. Now there was a book that showed you didn’t have to be dirty to be humorous. He happened to have a copy on hand and would be willing to prove his point.

More than willing; I knew he was dying to read it
aloud. He’d done this before, to Geoffrey and me, one night in La Jolla seven years earlier. It was a dim memory, pleasant and rare in that it held the three of us together. Of the book itself I recalled nothing except an atmosphere of treacly Englishness. But I couldn’t say no.

He started to read, smiling rhapsodically, the ice bag on his head. I was bored stiff until Toad of Toad Hall made his entrance and began his ruinous love affair with the automobile. “What dust clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way!” he cried. “What carts shall I fling carelessly into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset!” Toad had my attention. I found him funny, yes, but also familiar in a way that put me on alert.

Toad is arrested for stealing a car, and in the absence of any remorse is sentenced to twenty years in a dungeon. He escapes dressed as a washerwoman and manages to commandeer the very car he was imprisoned for stealing, after the owner offers a lift to what he thinks is a weary old crone. Toad pins the Samaritan with an elbow and seizes the wheel. “Washerwoman indeed!” he shouts. “Ho, ho! I am the Toad, the motorcar snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes! Sit still, and you shall know what driving really is, for you are in the hands of the famous, the skillful, the entirely fearless Toad!”

By now I knew where the déjà vu came from. My father was Toad. He wasn’t playing Toad, he
was
Toad, and not only Toad the audacious, Toad the shameless and incorrigible, but, as the story gave occasion, good-hearted Toad, hospitable Toad, Toad for whom his
friends would risk their very lives. I’d never seen my father so forgetful of himself, so undefended, so confiding.

He read the whole book. It took hours. I got up now and then to grab a beer and refill his glass of ginger ale, stretch, fix a plate of crackers and cheese, but quietly, so he wouldn’t break stride. The night deepened around us. Cars stopped going by. We were entirely at home, alone in an island of lamplight. I didn’t want anything to change.

But Toad couldn’t keep up the pace. The hounds of respectability were on his neck, and finally they brought him down. He had no choice but to make a good act of contrition and promise to keep the peace, live within his means, be good.

My father closed the book. He put it down and looked over at me, shaking his head at this transparent subterfuge. He wasn’t fooled. He knew exactly what Toad’s promise was worth.

I’
D MEANT ONLY
to touch down in Manhattan Beach, but day followed day and I was still there. In the afternoons I sat by the water and read. At night I went to a bar down the road, then came home and sat up with the old man, listening to music and shooting the breeze. We talked about everything except Vietnam and prison. Only once did he mention his life there, when I asked about a livid scar on his wrist. He told me he’d been cut in a fight over which television program to watch, and that stupid as it sounded he’d had no choice, and didn’t regret it. I never heard him mention another inmate, never heard him say “the joint”
or even “Chino.” He gave the impression it hadn’t touched him.

I was drinking too much. One night he asked me if I didn’t want to give the old noggin a breather, and I stalked out and came back even drunker than usual. I wanted it understood that he could expect nothing of me, as I expected nothing of him. He didn’t bring it up again. He seemed to accept the arrangement, and I found it congenial enough that I could even imagine going on in this way, the two of us in our own circle, living on our own terms. I had nearly six thousand dollars in the bank, a year’s worth of unspent salary and hazardous duty pay. If I enrolled in the local community college I could milk another three hundred a month from the G.I. Bill. They didn’t check to see if you actually went to class—all you had to do was sign up. I could get a place of my own nearby. Start writing. By the time my savings and subsidies ran out, I’d have a novel done. Just a thought, but it kept coming. I mentioned it to the old man. He seemed to like the idea.

It was a bad idea, conceived in laziness and certain to end miserably for both of us. Instead of masquerading as a student I needed to
be
a student, because I was uneducated and lacked the discipline to educate myself. Same with the novel. The novel wouldn’t get written, the money would all get spent, and then what? I had intimations of the folly of this plan, though I persisted in thinking about it.

I’d been in town about a week when I met a woman on the beach. She was reading and I was reading, so it seemed natural to compare notes. Her name was Jan. She did speech therapy in the local schools. She had
four or five years on me, maybe more. Her nose was very long and thin and she wore her blond hair mannishly close. She was calm, easy to talk to, but when I asked her out she frowned and looked away. She picked up a handful of sand, let it run through her fingers. “All right,” she said.

Grand Illusion
was showing at the local art theater. We got there early and strolled to the end of the street and back until they opened the doors. Jan wore a white dress that rustled as she walked and made her skin look dark as chocolate. She had the coolness and serenity of someone who has just finished a long swim. As we were going inside I noticed that her zipper had slipped a few inches. Hold on, I said, and slowly pulled it up again, standing close behind her, my nose almost in her hair.

I had seen
Grand Illusion
before, many times. My friend Laudie and I had memorized Pierre Fresnay’s death scene with Erich von Stroheim and used to play it out to impress our dates. But that night I couldn’t even follow the plot, I was so conscious of this woman beside me, her scent, the touch of her shoulder against mine, the play of light on her bare arms. At last I figured do or die and took her hand. She didn’t pull away. A little while later she laced her fingers through mine.

When the lights came on I was awkward and so was she. We agreed to stop somewhere for a drink. She didn’t have anyplace in mind so I took her to the bar where I’d been going, an alleged discotheque frequented by former servicemen and some still in uniform. The moment I saw Jan inside the place, in her white dress and cool, manifest sanity, I saw it for what
it was—a hole. But she claimed she liked it and insisted on staying.

We’d just gotten our drinks when a hand fell on my shoulder.

“Hey, Cap’n, you trying to keep this lovely lady all to yourself? No fuckin way, man.”

Dicky. Dicky and his sidekick, Sleepy.

Chairs scraped. Lighters and cigarettes and glasses descended on the table, a pitcher of beer. They were with us. Jan kept trying not to stare at Dicky, and kept failing. Dicky was clean-shaven but he had a big curly mustache tattooed above his lip. I couldn’t tell whether his intention was serious or jocular, if he actually thought he resembled a person with a mustache or was just riffing on the idea. He claimed to have been with a marine recon team near the DMZ, even to have operated in North Vietnam. I didn’t know what Sleepy’s story was.

They were there every night, hopping tables. The last time I’d seen them they were trying to break into Sleepy’s car after he’d locked the keys inside. Dicky rigged up a wire of some kind and when that didn’t work right away he went into a rage and smashed out the driver’s window, but not before he’d kicked some dents into the door panel and broken off the radio antenna. Sleepy stood there with the rest of us who’d come out of the bar to watch, and didn’t say a word.

Dicky caught Jan looking at him. He looked back at her. “So,” he said, “how’d you get to know this cabron? Hey, just kidding, the cap’n here’s numero fuckin uno.”

I told him we’d been to see a film together.

“Film?
You saw a
film?
What happen, your specs
get dirty? Hey, Sleepy, you hear that? The cap’n says he saw a film, I say, What happen, your specs get dirty?”

“I laughed,” Sleepy said, “didn’t you hear me laugh?”

“No, I didn’t hear you laugh. Speak up, asshole! So what film did you see, Cap’n?” For some reason sweat was pouring out of his hair and down his face.

I gave Dicky the short description of
Grand Illusion
.

He was interested. “That was some bad shit, man, Whirl War One. All that bob wire and overcoats and shit, livin like a buncha moles, come out, take a look around,
eeeeeeeerrr, boom
, your fuckin head gets blown off. No way, man. No fuckin way. I couldn’t get behind that shit
at all
. I mean, millions of assholes going south, right? Millions! It’s like you take the whole city of L.A., tell em, Hey, muchachos, here’s the deal, you just run into that bob wire over there and let those other fuckers put holes in you. Big Bertha, man. And poison gas, what about that mustard shit, you think you could handle that?”