Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (16 page)

 
          
The
dayroom of the Elysian Fields Manor and Convalescent Center was a large and
sunny space, with gauzy white curtains drawn back from the broad airy windows so
that daylight poured gaily in, sparkling on walkers and crutches, glistening on
shiny heads and pale white elbows, gleaming on inhalers and syringes. The
peaceful quiet calm was counterpointed, never disturbed, by the occasional
turning of a card, turning of a page, or rustle of a long-drawn sigh.

 
          
Heads
were lifted, eyes were rolled, fingers twitched at coverlets, as Sara returned
after lunch, striding into the neat and clean dayroom with her bulging shoulder
bag bouncing at her hip. The starched and ironed nurse accompanying her
gestured to the farthest comer of the room, where a pair of identical
wheelchairs contained a pair of identical oldsters in identical pajamas under
identical blankets. Sara nodded, and the two women marched across the room to Joe
and Jim Geester, the nurse saying brightly on arrival, “Hi, Joe and Jim, here’s
your visitor again.”

 
          
“Remember
me, guys?” Sara asked, making her voice as bright and chipper as the nurse’s.

 
          
Joe
Geester—he was the one on the right—lifted a lumpy potato head with a cranky
sour face drawn on the front of it and creakily said, “Girl reporter.”

 
          
“That’s
right!” Sara said, smiling and sparkling. “From the
Weekly Galaxy
, gonna give you guys just the
best
party ever! One hundred years young tomorrow, huh, guys?”

 
          
“Well,”
the nurse said, ‘Til leave you to discuss the details.” Turning away, she said
under her breath to Sara, “Don’t get too close.”

 
          
“I
won’t,” Sara murmured back, and beamed again on the birthday boys, saying, “All
set for the big party?”

 
          
As
the nurse marched away toward the exit, Joe’s ancient scrawny hand emerged from
under the blankets, making clutching motions. “Come a litde closer,” he said.

 
          
“Oh,
I think I’m close enough,” Sara said. “Now, let me tell you about the party. We
found some Geesters outside
Cicero
,
Illinois
,
might
be related to you, and—”

 
          
“Liars!”
Joe snapped.

           
“Well, anyway,” Sara said, her smile
insistent and undimmed, “they’re coming to the party, you can compare relatives
then. And guess who else is coming?”

 
          
“Cheryl
Tiegs?”

           
Ignoring that, Sara said,
“Three
mayors! And Dr. Bark, and—”

 
          
“Butcher!”
cried Joe.

           
Sara didn’t follow that. She said,
“You want me to invite the butcher?”

           
“Bark’s a butcher!” yelled Joe, and
a few quavery voices nearby said, “Right on!” and, “Tell it, brother!”

 
          
“Oh,
now, Jim,” Sara said, “look on the sunny side. I bet—”

 
          
“I’m
Joe,” Joe snarled.

           
“Oh. Sorry. Anyway, I bet Jim
doesn’t feel that—”

 
          
“Jim’s
dead,” Joe said, and snapped his gums.

           
Sara blinked at him. “What?”

           
“Died about an hour ago,” Joe said,
in grim satisfaction. “Went—” And he rattled in his throat; a truly dreadful
noise.

 
          
Sara,
her
heart
in her throat, leaned close
to the suspiciously silent Jim. Those were not living eyes. That was not a
living mouth. “Oh, golly,” she said.

 
          
Joe’s
clutching hand reached out, moving toward Sara, but too slow and too late; she
was already turning away, shocked, gray-faced, moving, running, yelling,
“Nurse! Nurse!”

 
          
Massa
sat at his desk in his elevator/office,
drinking beer from the bottle. Jacob Harsch paced back and forth in front of
the desk, studying various sheets of paper. “They’re getting lax, sloppy,” he
muttered. “A few random firings, that’ll put some spirit in them.”

 
          
Massa
laughed. “Haven’t had a good old bloodbath
in quite a while,” he said.

 
          
“They’re
getting fat, they think it’s too easy, they think they
deserve
all this somehow. Chop a few heads, that’ll do it.”

           
“But not Boy,” Massa said.

 
          
“No,
of course not.”

 
          
“Boy’s
worth the lot of them.”

 
          
The
phone on
Massa
’s desk rang, and
Massa
watched Harsch pick it up and speak into
it: “Mr. DeMassi’s office.” He listened, his lips twitching faindy, and then he
looked over at
Massa
to say, “The twins, hundred years old tomorrow.”

 
          
“Sweet
story,”
Massa
said, smiling at the thought of it.
“Beautiful story.”

 
          
“One
died.”

 
          
Massa
’s mouth dropped open. “Died? Before his
birthday?”

 
          
“The
reporter out there wants to know, do we go ahead with the party.”

 
          
“Of
course not!”
Massa
said, astonished that the question could even be asked. “What’s that
supposed to be? A party for one twin?”

 
          
Into
the phone, Harsch said, “No party.” He listened again, nodded, said to
Massa
, “What about the cake?”

 
          
Ridiculous;
Massa
knew it was ridiculous. He pushed the
button on his desk that opened the elevator doors, revealing that they were at
this time on the third floor, with the conference table and, beyond it out over
the floor, Editorial. Way out there, among the other people, desks, chairs,
filing cabinets, Jack Ingersoll stood beside his desk with the phone to his
ear. But Massa didn’t need a phone for this. Half rising over his desk,
pointing out at Ingersoll, knowing the fellow could see and hear him,
Massa
bellowed,
“He doesn't get the cake!"

 
          
On
the pay phone on the street comer down the block from the Elysian Fields Manor
and
Convalescent
Center
, pickup trucks and old
Hudsons
puddling by behind her, Sara said
unbelievingly, “He doesn’t get the
cake?
Do you mean, not only is his brother dead, he doesn’t get the party? He doesn’t
even get the cake?”

 
          
In
her ear, faintly apologetic but holding out no hope at all, Jack Ingersoll’s
voice said, “Sorry, Sara, that’s from
Massa
himself. He just bellowed it at me from
across the room.”

 
          
Sara
shook her head, trying to think, saying, “I can’t believe even
Massa
, even the
Galaxy,
would be so low that—” She broke off, blinked, licked her
lips, looked desperate, and quickly said, “Yes, Doctor? Wait a minute, Jack.
Yes, Doctor?”

 
          
“What’s
that?” Jack’s tiny voice said. “Sara?” Speaking a few inches away from the
phone, sounding hopeful but doubtful, Sara said, “Are you
sure,
Doctor?” Then, in a sudden burst of delight, “That’s
wonderful, Doctor!”

           
“Sara? Sara?”

 
          
“A
miracle?” Sara cried into the phone. “Jack, did you hear? He isn’t dead! He had
a relapse! The other thing, I mean, the opposite. He’s alive, Jack!”

           
The deeply suspicious voice of Jack
said in her ear, “Sara, are you trying to con
me?”

 
          
“Jack,
how can you say that? The doctor’s right here, you can ask him your— Oh, he had
to get back to his patient. Jack, listen, I better get off, I’ve got this party
coming up.”

 
          
“With
pictures,
Sara,” said that deeply
suspicious voice.

 
          
“Well,
sure! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” There on the street comer, out of
her mind, Sara laughed girlishly, and a middle-aged couple, on their way to
visit Mom at Elysian Fields, gave her a dirty' look. “I’ll have pictures,
Jack,” she said, waving brightly at the passing couple. “I’ll have everything,
I’ll get it
all.
Bye, now!” And she
hung up, clenching her teeth, not moaning in agony until the connection was
definitely and absolutely broken. Then she sagged forward against the phone,
resting her fevered brow on the coin slot. “I’ll have pictures,” she muttered.
“Everything. Somehow.”

 
          
Slowly
Jack hung up the phone, but continued to stand there, looking at it as though
it might make a sudden move, might all at once bite him. Mary Kate looked over.
“Sara?”

 
          
“She’s
out there,” Jack said. “With a questionable number of twins. Give me your
reading, Mary Kate. Does that girl know what she’s doing?”

 
          
“Of
course not,” Mary Kate said. “Why should she be any different from the rest of
us?”

 
          
Tann-ta-rraaa!!
The Whitcomb, Indiana, Volunteer Hook and Ladder Fire Department, Engine
Company 2, Fife, Drum, Bugle, Bagpipe, Glockenspiel and Clarinet Corps marched
in place, blowing and plinking and whomping and wheezing, pounding the emerald
green front lawn of the Elysian Fields Manor and Convalescent Home into brown
muck, tearing off their rendition of “When the Saints Come Marching In” (not,
perhaps, the happiest of choices, but no one seemed to notice), until Company
Commander and Bandmaster J. Garrison Murchison IV shrilled his whistle, smartly
about-faced, and led his seventeen widely assorted musicians in through the front
door, down the wide main hall, through the double doorway at its end with the
banner strung overhead reading
HAPPY
100,
JOE AND jim!,
and into the dayroom,
alive—sort of—with the birthday celebration.

 
          
It
was a dayroom transformed. Pink and white crepe streamers corkscrewed from
comer to comer and from light fixture to light fixture overhead. Golden-agers
seated in all manner of chairs and conveyances lined both long walls, flanking
THE CAKE, whose twenty-foot length down the middle of the thirty-foot room
effectively created through mitosis two parties where only one had been
planned. THE WEEKLY GALAXY AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SALUTE JOE AND JIM GEESTER
ON THEIR 100TH BIRTHDAY!!! read the cake, from end to end, in garish red
letters on the pure white icing.

 
          
The
cake had not as yet been broken into; in the meantime, secondary tables on the
side walls contained platters of cheese sandwiches on white bread, Campbell’s
Cream of Mushroom Soup dip with potato chips, thawed but unheated egg rolls, a
big green and red platter of crudites which everybody avoided on the assumption
it was merely a decorative vegetable centerpiece, and both chocolate chip
cookies and Fig Newtons. Weak coffee, see-through tea and a big bowl of Hi-C
punch were the available quaffs.

 
          
In
addition to the dayroom’s normal occupants, shunted for the moment to the side,
there were new faces here for the special occasion. Three bewildered mayors, a
whole lot of intendy eating Geesters from
Cicero
,
Illinois
, Dr. Bark the butcher and various other celebrities milled about both
sides of the cake. The photographer, ungainly and lumpish in her brogans, gray
tube socks, heavy shapeless black skirt, pilled brown sweater over tom green
polo shirt, and decayed red bandana around neck, hung about with cameras and
light meters, swooped and squatted around the room like some endangered species
of flightless bird, now standing bent forward on one leg, now seated in a
sprawl of skins on the floor, now flat on her back under one of the tables
bearing the cake, now lunging with high-kneed hops toward some new object of
her magpie interest, and always with one or another of her cameras to her
sweating and exalted face.

 
          
Just
to the right of the doorway, as the marching band marched in (to bifurcate at
the cake and finish the number marching in place all around it, while various
sections of the cake slowly subsided), stood Sara with Harry Razza and Louis B.
Urbiton, they drinking plastic cups of Hi-C punch which they had privately
altered to their taste, she drinking and eating nothing, but smiling broadly in
terror and accomplishment. This was
her
party, her creation and then some.

 
          
Of
course, she’d had help. The staff and other residents of Elysian Fields, when
shown the clear choice between abetting a felony or losing the party, with its
attendant food and drink, not to mention publicity and visitors from the great
outer world, had seen immediately and to a person which way duty lay. (In fact,
when the surviving Geester boy, out of simple cantankerousness, had threatened
not to cooperate, it was his fellow residents of the Manor who had swiftly
ended that revolution, with graphic portrayals of what Joe’s life among them
would be like, however long or short, should he continue to make trouble.)

 
          
Among
Sara’s fellow representatives of the
Weekly
Galaxy,
participation had been general, unstinting and immediate. The
photographer, faced with the alternative of the long solitary drive back to
Indianapolis
without even the solace of sold photographs
and paid expenses, had with great enthusiasm entered into the conspiracy. Harry
Razza and Louis B. Urbiton, old hands at the manufacturing of news, fell in
with a will and many a valuable suggestion. But the whole thing would
nevertheless have been impossible were it not for Bob Sangster and his nose.

 
          
It
turned out, on close inspection, that the Bob Sangster nose and the nose shared
by Joe and Jim Geester were so markedly similar in both size and construction
that they might actually even be related in some distant way, a concept that
both Bob and Joe denied with vehement disgust. Working from that proboscal
commonality, with makeup assistance from Sara and Harry Razza and the
photographer, selective shaving of the Sangster head, and a set of pajamas,
slippers, blanket and wheelchair to match that of the surviving twin, Bob
Sangster was turned into a simulacrum of Jim Geester (or Joe, actually, that
having been the model they’d worked from) so realistic that one nurse, seeing
the false Jim placed in his wheelchair beside the real Joe, commented, “By God,
it’s like having the filthy old bastard back again.”

 
          
(The
real Jim Geester slept the long sleep upstairs in his room, the air conditioner
turned on full and the door locked. Immediately after the party, it would be
discovered that the joy and excitement had been too much for old Jim. Dr. Bark
the butcher, cheerily eating Fig Newtons and chatting with the mayors, would
fill out and sign and date the death certificate, and Lloyd Llewellyn of
Llewellyn’s Mortuary, who considered Elysian Fields Manor by far his most
frequent and valued customer, could be counted on to handle the obsequies
without question or fuss.)

 
          
The
mayors and Cicero Geesters and other special guests were the first gulls of
this cabal, and were eating it up a lot more enthusiastically than they did the
mushroom soup. At the far end of the room, in subtly dimmer light, the two
birthday boys sat in identical postures of slumpshouldered hopelessness, one
clutching an empty plastic cup (he’d spilled the Hi-C punch on his blanket),
the other feebly picking at a Fig Newton. Watching them from her post near the
door, as the dismemberment of “When the Saints Come Marching In” at last
clattered to its photo finish, Sara for just a second couldn’t remember which
was which, but then got it straight—the one who’d spilled his punch was Bob,
startled at having found it non-alcoholic—and said, “By golly, I wouldn’t have
believed it.”

 
          
“Amazing,”
Louis B. Urbiton agreed. “Bob’s the spic qualities all these years unknown, unsung.”

 
          
“They’d
better stay unknown and unsung,” Sara said.

 
          
“Oh,
truly,” Louis agreed. “Be worth our jobs, wouldn’t it?”

 
          
Harry
Razza knocked back his redecorated punch and said, “Looks like two of them to
me anyway.”

 
          
“Ladies
and gentlemen!” cried Dr. Bark the butcher into the comparative quiet left when
the volunteer fire department had downed instruments, “it’s time to cut the
cake!”

 
          
“Don’t
let
him
cut it!” quavered some
ancient wag. “It’ll never survive!”

 
          
“Ha
ha,” Dr. Bark the butcher said, smiling around like a searchlight, trying to
find the funny fellow.

 
          
“Hold
it!” cried the photographer, crashing over a number of invalids and visiting
Geesters to get into just the right position. “Now!” she yelled. “Cut it now!”

 
          
“Joe
and, uh, Jim,” Dr. Bark the butcher said, smiling broadly in their direction
and raising over his head the unnecessarily large knife, “this is for you.”

 
          
“Look
out, Joe!” cried the still anonymous wag.

 
          
Ignoring
this interruption, Dr. Bark the butcher sliced into a somewhat underdone
segment of cake and brought up a knife all gooey and runny, to which a piece of
exclamation point adhered, that being the end at which the doctor’s operation
had begun. Gazing in revulsion at his knife, Dr. Bark the butcher said, “Who
did the prep on this cake?”

 
          
Well,
it didn’t matter. Once the initial incision had been made, the guests fell to
the cake with knives and forks and spoons and spatulas and playing cards and
tearing fingers like an Islamic mob finding a heretic in its midst. In the
eating frenzy that followed, no one thought to give any of the cake to the
birthday boys, but that was all right; it wasn’t on their diets, anyway.

           
The fuss around the cake woke Joe
Geester from a dream in which he was at last putting it to that little Mrs.
McKellahy the trolley conductor’s wife in 3A; sixty-seven years dropped on him
like a dead buffalo with consciousness; so who would want to be conscious? He
turned his head to say something nasty to Jim, and what he saw brought
near-term memory into alignment with long-term memory and gave him even
more
to be sour about. “You,” he
commented, without pleasure.

 
          
Bob
Sangster, not all that rollicking in mood himself since discovering and
spilling the contents of his Hi-C punch cup, nodded in agreement. “Me,” he
acknowledged.

 
          
Joe
looked him over, feeling more cranky by the second, but knowing he didn’t dare
do a thing to queer this deal; which only made him crankier. “You don’t look a
thing like me,” he snarled.

 
          
“I’m
not you, you old turkey,” Bob said. “I’m your brother Jim.”

 
          
“Don’t
sound like me, neither.”

 
          
“Was
your brother as sweet as you?”

 
          
“No,”
Joe said thoughtfully, looking back down the years. “I was always the
good-natured one.” Bob stared at him in disbelief.

           
“Hold it!” cried the photographer,
squatting wide-kneed in the space between them and the cake as though planning
to relieve herself right then and there; but with the black box of the camera
mashed to her absorbed face.

 
          
“Come
a little closer,” Joe told her.

           
“This is perfect, right here!” the
photographer told him. “Hold it!”

 
          
They
held it.