Condominium (36 page)

“She was on the verge of complete liver failure when she was brought in. It was fortunate that she could keep her wits about her enough to call an ambulance.”

“It looked more like she was hemorrhaging to death,” the banker said. “She threw up in a wastebasket near the bed, and there was so much …” He turned slightly gray.

“Less blood than it would look like, actually,” Dr. Vidal said. “The thinned blood drained into the stomach and combined with stomach acids to form those large clots you described to me.”

“What are you doing for her now, in Intensive Care?” the broker asked.

“A small balloon has been inserted into the esophagus and inflated. This collapses the leaking veins against the wall of the esophagus and encourages clotting and stops the bleeding. She has had transfusions and we have given her clotting agents, and we have tapped the abdominal cavity and drained almost two liters of fluid accumulation. The balloon stopped the bleeding yesterday, but it began again in the night.”

Jud, the banker, said, “Doctor, what
can
be done for her?”

“Lay it all out,” Fred, the broker, said.

The doctor took his glasses off, sighed, held them to the light, huffed on them, began cleaning them with tissue. “We get quite a few of these cases, people in their fifties. They have had years and years of social drinking, and then it has turned into something else. And finally after ten years of hard drinking, the liver begins to quit. It is difficult for me to separate professional imperatives from moral judgments.”

“I think you’d better explain that,” said Jud, the banker.

“I hope to try, if you’ll let me. If we can’t stop the bleeding, the next step would be a procedure called a portal shunt. It means rerouting the whole blood supply system to and from the liver. It is a major operation. It is a very messy operation, because the thinned blood makes a bad field to work in. It takes four or five hours, and a lot of transfusions. If it succeeds, then the patient has another three weeks before going home. Postoperative patients after this particular operation are bad news on the floor. They seldom regain full mental acuity. They are quarrelsome, primitive, demanding and messy. That is not a judgment. That is a fact. If they recover and go home, most of them die within the year of liver failure.”

“Why? How come?”

“For the liver to be so bad that a portal shunt is required, it is generally so far gone that the renewed blood supply is not going to hold it steady. Besides, most of them seem to find their way to alcohol as soon as they get strong enough.”

Fred said, “You’re telling us Mom is dead.”

“My professional judgment is that whether or not we stop the bleeding, she will die within the year of liver failure.”

“Which … which would be easiest for her? Easiest on her?”

“I would think if we could stop the bleeding it would be best all around.”

“Do they transplant livers?” the banker asked.

“Not yet,” said Doctor Vidal. “At least not at her age in her condition.”

After the doctor was gone, the brothers walked down to the parking lot, moving slowly. When they passed a tall metal light standard,
Jud Brasser, the banker, stopped and put an arm around it and leaned his forehead against the painted steel. “Oh, Momma,” he said in a gravely voice. “Oh, Momma, Jesus, Momma.”

Fred Brasser put his hand on Jud’s shoulder and patted him. “Come on, kid. Come on.”

Jud slapped the metal pole, making it ring. He straightened and pulled out a handkerchief and honked into it. He glowered at Fred, his eyes still brimming, and said, “Don’t you hate those little fucks? Those little white-coat fucks with the equipment hanging around their necks? They don’t give a shit about anybody.”

“I guess this one is pretty much okay, kid. He leveled with us, at least.”

“She
wasn’t
an alcoholic. I mean she
isn’t
!”

“Not the least damn bit when we were growing up. Neither of them were. You know that. Dad liked a few knocks, and he had to do some drinking with the customers in his line of work. And they entertained a lot and went out a lot. Hell, they got high, but not drunk. You know. Drunk people belt each other around.”

Jud sighed. “You’re talking too much to keep from saying what is going to have to be said, sooner or later. Let’s get out of the sun.”

At the counter in an icy coffee shop in midafternoon, Jud said, looking down at his coffee, “I don’t have to remind you how we felt when the old man all of a sudden died from that clot, how all four of us felt, you and Ginny and me and Marie, thinking she would probably be stone broke from the way they always lived, and we were sparring around to see who was going to take her in first.”

“But it was—”

“Shut up, big brother. Let’s stop the shit, just this one time. So
we all gathered up there at the funeral of Newcomb Carlyle Brasser, wives and kids and all, and afterward, when she wanted the advice of her two big-shot sons, we found out, lo and behold, not only did she have a nice little package of utilities stocks, plus the old man’s Social Security, but they also had the apartment down here. Now you know exactly what she wanted, Freddy. So did I. She
said
she wanted to get rid of the big house and move down here where she and Dad had wanted to retire, except he didn’t make it. We both
knew
she wanted to come out and live with us half the year in Santa Monica and with you the other half in Fort Worth. Didn’t you know that?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe,
hell
! Why would Mom want to come down here where she didn’t know
anybody
?”

“She never had trouble making friends.”

“That’s what we told ourselves, Freddy, that she would get along just fine and dandy down here. We said that she ought to do just like all the other old people, go to one of these retirement heavens on earth. We sat there with our sad egg-sucking smiles, and we told that lonesome woman we didn’t want her in our lives. We practically told her that her life was over and it was our turn to have our lives, and she would crap up our privacy and our home life and our kids and our entertaining and our vacations and everything else if we had the burden of that old woman!”

“Now, God damn it …”

“Shut up.” He tapped his fist lightly on the countertop. “We did it. We made the decision. We can’t go back now and make a different one. I just think we ought to split this burden of guilt half and half. Hell, we talked to enough of those people in that Golden Sands to know what they thought of her. Peggy Brasser, the drunk. Get out of the road, here comes Peggy Brasser. Some kind
of friends she made, hah? You want Peggy, look for her at the Sand Dollar Bar.”

“I’m not denying anything,” Fred said. “Her letters were always cheerful. She remembered birthdays and anniversaries. How was I to know she was going downhill? I thought it was all working out for her, same as you did.”

“If she’d been living with us, or even near one of us, she would have been okay,” Jud said.

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Maybe not. But I like the odds. And maybe my kids would have had some benefit from it. I have the feeling that the more people there are around kids who are … related to them, part of a bigger family around them, the more the kids respond to approval and disapproval.”

“Jud?”

“What?”

“It … makes me feel ashamed, and then angry for feeling ashamed when I really can’t see why I should feel that way.”

“It’s a start.”

“And you are saying that somebody stays here until she can travel west?”

“Which will probably have to be you. I’m in too much of a dog fight with the regulatory people right now over our holding company. I told you about it.”

Fred sighed. “Which will probably have to be me. Why not? With these nine-thousand-share days, the office is like a graveyard. If Ginny can get her sister to take the kids, she can come help out.”

“Stay in the apartment?”

“I guess so. We’d better wait and see if they stop that bleeding before planning anything.”

From the hotel coffee-shop stool, Jud could look left through
tinted glass and see the tall caramel towers of the condominiums stretching along the beach of Fiddler Key.

“There’s a lot of them,” he said softly. “Buildings full of the old folks, under some kind of compulsion to enjoy the hell out of the sunset years. They should be with their blood kin, and deep inside them they know it. Can’t admit it. If they admit it, it means admitting their children are selfish, indifferent turds. How the hell did old folks get to be a race apart? For that matter, how did the teenagers become a different tribe? We’re all split up into fragments of what it used to be, brother. And it seems to me that no part of it all is having a good time by itself. And the kids don’t learn shit about their own family past. All those apartments, Freddy, think of it. What it is, maybe, is a market. The oldsters market. Sell to the senior citizens. Group them and sell to them. If they are scattered all over hell and gone, it costs too much to reach your market. Get them into a herd, and sell one, and he’ll sell his neighbors.”

Fred said, “I’m going back to the hospital. Coming?”

“No. I’m going to walk to Golden Sands.”

“That would be two miles, about. It’s hot and we’re going to get that rain again today.”

“Well … drop me off. Phone me there if there’s a change.”

“Sure. We … we did what we thought was best. And she could have gotten sick wherever she was.”

“Probably. Probably.” His tone was lifeless. The conversation was over. It was the voice he used to bring committee meetings to an early adjournment. He still wanted to walk, but it wasn’t worth the argument. And he wanted to cry, but knew he couldn’t, not yet.

ON A TORRID WEDNESDAY MORNING
in early August, Martin Liss took scratch paper and once again computed his net worth after taxes. Four and a quarter mil, figuring it conservatively. The speculation in Swiss francs was doing very very well. With Sherman Grome’s crap game listed on the big board at six, he could count a profit thus far of two hundred and twenty-two thousand on his short side of EMMS shares.

And there was no more fun in trying to push the Harbour Pointe project. There was no way he could win and no way he could lose. There wasn’t enough money to do it the way he had planned, absolutely first class. The Tropic Towers problem was being solved. What they had done was scare hell out of the few buyers already in residence and gotten them to approve pets and kids. Then they had moved in a dozen families rent-free, into furnished apartments, on a thirty-day or sixty-day basis, families with kids and dogs and cats and so forth. Lots of activity. Young people
running around all over the place. And he had cut the average price to $23,995 and taken a couple of full pages, and in spite of the times they had really moved a bunch of them. Take a little loss here and now, but make it up over a period of time in recreation leases and maintenance agreements.

Drusilla Bryne had done an absolutely first-class job at Tropic Towers once she had moved into the penthouse, functioning as manager and sales manager, just as she had in the early days of Golden Sands. Good thing there hadn’t been too much to do at the office, giving her more time at the Towers. He rocked back and forth on his elevator shoes and stared frowning at the horizon line and tugged at his goatee, and wondered what sort of bonus he should give her, if any. It could come out of Marliss. Nice cash balance in Marliss since Letra had reimbursed Marliss for all prior costs on the Harbour Pointe project.

He felt edgy and restless. The report on the third Mrs. Liss was a month old and he had not done a thing about it, or wanted to. It didn’t seem that important. The investigator had been a second-generation Cuban with a cracker accent. His report was semi-illiterate but crammed with facts, and accompanied by some grainy blowups of black-and-white telephoto shots. Francie Liss was presently getting laid by the assistant tennis pro at the club. It was a matinee arrangement on Mondays and Thursdays, his afternoons off. He shared a frame cottage on a side street a mile from the club with two other gainfully employed jocks. She would drive down a narrow alley and park her gray sun-roof Mercedes between a tin shed and a giant banyan tree and walk through the junk in the yard and go in through the back. They would do most of their screwing on a big blanket-covered mattress on the floor of the so-called Florida room at the rear of the house, and Martinez had gotten his art photos by waiting in the banyan tree one Thursday for her to
arrive and staying there until well after she left. The agency had made blowups of the few which showed her face distinctly and left no question as to what she was doing, and no question that it was not with her husband, who was some eight inches shorter, thirty pounds lighter, and far hairier than her muscular lover.

Whenever he needed it, the report was there, documented and notarized. And illustrated. He could not really feel any differently about her than he had before. She was lively and decorative, and sometimes funny, and he had never trusted her and still didn’t.

What he ought to do, he thought, was fold up the Marliss Corporation. Liquidate all its assets. The big asset was the stock in Services Management Group of Miami. The quarterly dividends were heavy, but that was, of course, only a part of it. Enough of the income was in cash to permit a skim, nothing like the kind of skim those same boys had arranged out in Las Vegas before Hughes moved in and made a full declaration of all casino income and gave the IRS a basis for comparison. Some of them in Miami had talked about how it used to be in Vegas and Havana. They had some operations over there in Dade County that did not concern Marty Liss, and in which he did not want to get involved, but they kept Services Management Group clean, except for the little skim, because it was a legitimate investment area for some of the money from the other things. Sometimes somebody passing through would bring his share of the cash over, but usually he would get it when he had to be in Miami. Pocket money. He kept it in the locked drawer of his desk and took some out when he ran low.