Deadeye Dick (17 page)

I was a Midland City celebrity, of course, so every so often I heard or thought I heard these words: “Deadeye Dick.”

I gave no sign that I heard them. What would have been the point of my looking this or that person in the eye, accusing him or her of having called me “Deadeye Dick”? I deserved the name.

When I got to within a rank of the information counter, I learned that the other people were there principally to gain some measure of respect. No truly urgent questions were being put to the three frazzled women behind the counter.

Typical questions:

“What’s the latest news, miss?”

“If we want blankets, where do we go?”

“Do you know that they’re out of toilet paper in the ladies’ room?”

“How sick do you have to be to get a room?”

“Could I have some dimes for when the telephones start working again?”

“Is that clock right?”

“Can we use just one burner in the kitchen for about fifteen minutes?”

“Dr. Mitchell is my doctor. I’m not sick, but would you please tell him I’m here anyway?”

“Is there a list of everybody who’s here? Do you want my name?”

“Is there some office where they’ll cash a personal check for me?”

“Can I help some way?”

“My mother’s got this pain in her left leg that won’t go away. What should I do?”

“What is the Power and Light Company doing?”

“Should I tell somebody that I’ve got a legful of shrapnel from the First World War?”

I came to admire the three women behind the counter. They were patient and polite, for the most part. One of them blew up ever so briefly at the man with the legful of shrapnel. Her initial reply had somehow left him unsatisfied, and he told her that she had no business in the medical profession, if she wouldn’t listen to what people were trying to tell her about themselves. I had a vague idea who he was, and I had my doubts about his ever having been in any war. I was pretty sure he was one of the Gatch brothers, who used to work for the Marítimo Brothers Construction Company, until they were caught stealing tools and building materials.

If he was who I was pretty sure he was, he had a daughter who was two years ahead of me in school, Mary or Martha or Marie, maybe, who was a shoplifter. She was always trying to turn people into friends by making them presents of things she stole.

And the woman behind the counter told him bitterly that she was just an ordinary housewife, who had volunteered
to help at the hospital, and that she hadn’t been to sleep for twenty-four hours. It was late afternoon by then.

I realized that I knew who she was, too—not approximately, but exactly. Twenty-four hours of sleeplessness had made her, in my eyes, anyway, an idealized representative of compassionate, long-suffering women of all ages everywhere. She denied that she was a nurse, but she was a nurse anyway, without vanity or guile.

I have a tendency, anyway, to swoon secretly in the presence of nurturing women, since my own mother was such a cold and aggressively helpless old bat.

Who was this profoundly beautiful and unselfish woman behind the counter? What a surprise! This was Celia Hoover, née Hildreth, the wife of the Pontiac dealer—once believed to be the dumbest girl in high school. I wanted Felix to get a look at her, but I could not spot him anywhere. The last time he had seen her, she had been cutting through a vacant lot in the nighttime, way back in 1943.

•   •   •

She was a robot in back of the counter. Her memory was blasted by weariness. I asked her if Mr. and Mrs. Otto Waltz were in the hospital, and she looked in a card file. She told me mechanically that Otto Waltz was in intensive care, in critical condition, and could not have visitors, and that Emma Wetzel Waltz was not in serious condition, and had been given a bed in a makeshift ward which had been set up in the basement.

So there was a member of our distinguished family down in a basement again.

I had never been in the basement of the hospital before. But I had known this much about it even when I was a little boy: That was where they had the city morgue.

That had been the first stop for Eloise Metzger, after I shot her between the eyes.

•   •   •

I found Felix standing in a corner of the lobby, agog at the crowd. He hadn’t done anything to try and find Mother and Father. He was useless. “Help me, Rudy,” he said, “—I’m seventeen years old again.” It was true.

“Somebody just called me the ‘Velvet Fog,’ ” he marveled. This was the sobriquet of a famous singer of popular music named Mel Tormé. Felix had also been nicknamed that in high school.

“Whoever called me that,” he said, “said it sneeringly, as though I should be ashamed of myself. It was a real fat guy, with cold blue eyes. A grown man in a business suit. Nobody’s spoken to me like that since the Army took me away from here.”

It was easy for me to guess who he was talking about. It had to be Jerry Mitchell, who had been Felix’s worst enemy in high school. “Jerry Mitchell,” I said.

“That was Jerry?” said Felix. “He’s so heavy. He’s lost so much hair!”

“Not only that,” I said, “but he’s a doctor now.”

“I pity his patients,” said Felix. “He used to torture
cats and dogs, and say he was performing scientific experiments.”

And there was prophecy in that. Dr. Mitchell was building a big practice on the principle that nobody in modern times should ever be the least uncomfortable or dissatisfied, since there were now pills for everything. And he would buy himself a great big house out in Fairchild Heights, right next door to Dwayne and Celia Hoover, and he would encourage Celia and his own wife, and God only knows who all else, to destroy their minds and spirits with amphetamine.

About that insect swarm around my head, all those bits of information I had on this person and that one: Dr. Jerome Mitchell was married to the former Barbara Squires, the younger sister of Anthony Squires. Anthony Squires was the policeman who had given me the nickname Deadeye Dick.

•   •   •

Father’s deathbed scene went like this: Mother and Felix and I were there, right by his bed. Gino and Marco Marítimo, faithful to the end, had driven to the hospital atop their own bulldozer. It would later turn out that these two endearing old poops had done hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage on the way, tearing up hidden automobiles and fences and fire hydrants and mailboxes, and so on. They had to stay out in the corridor, since they weren’t blood relatives.

Father was under an oxygen tent. He was all shot up with antibiotics, but his body couldn’t fight off the pneumonia. Too much else was wrong. The hospital had shaved off his thick, youthful hair and mustache, so that an accidental spark couldn’t make them burn like gunpowder in the presence of all that oxygen. He seemed to be asleep, but having nightmares, fighting with his eyes closed, when Felix and I came in.

Mother had already been there for hours. Her frostbitten hands and feet were enclosed in plastic bags filled with a yellow salve, so that she couldn’t touch any of us. This turned out to be an experimental treatment for frostbite, invented right there in Midland City that very morning, by a Doctor Miles Pendleton. We assumed that all frostbite victims had their damaged parts encased in plastic and salve. Mother, in fact, was probably the only person in history to be treated that way.

She was a human guinea pig, and we didn’t even know it.

No harm done, luckily.

•   •   •

Father’s peephole closed forever at sunset on the day after the opening and closing of my play. He was sixty-eight. The only word Felix and I heard from him was his very last one, which was this: “Mama.” It was Mother who told us about his earlier deathbed assertions—that he had at least been good with children, that he had always tried to
behave honorably, and that he hoped he had at least brought some appreciation of beauty to Midland City, even if he himself hadn’t been an artist.

•   •   •

He mentioned guns, according to Mother, but he didn’t editorialize about them. All he said was, “Guns.”

The wrecked guns, including the fatal Springfield, had been donated to a scrap drive during the war—along with the weather vane. They might have killed a lot more people when they were melted up and made into shells or bombs or hand grenades or whatever.

Waste not, want not.

•   •   •

As far as I know, he had only one big secret which he might have told on his deathbed: Who killed August Gunther, and what became of Gunther’s head. But he didn’t tell it. Who would have cared? Would there have been any social benefit in prosecuting old Francis X. Morissey, who had become chief of police and was about to retire, for accidentally blowing Gunther’s head off with a ten-gauge shotgun forty-four years ago?

Let sleeping dogs lie.

•   •   •

When Felix and I got to Father, he was a baby again. He thought his mother was somewhere around. He died
believing that he had once owned one of the ten greatest paintings in the world. This wasn’t “The Minorite Church of Vienna” by Adolf Hitler. Father had nothing to say about Hitler as he died. He had learned his lesson about Hitler. One of the ten greatest paintings in the world, as far as he was concerned, was “Crucifixion in Rome,” by John Rettig, which he had bought for a song in Holland, during his student days. It now hangs in the Cincinnati Art Museum.

“Crucifixion in Rome,” in fact, was one of the few successes in the art marketplace, or in any sort of marketplace, which Father experienced in his threescore years and eight. When he and Mother had to put up all their treasures for sale, in order to pay off the Metzgers, they had imagined that their paintings alone were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They advertised in an art magazine, I remember, that an important art collection was to be liquidated, and that serious collectors and museum curators could see it by appointment in our house.

About five people did come all the way to Midland City for a look, I remember, and found the collection ludicrous. One man, I remember, wanted a hundred pictures for a motel he was furnishing in Biloxi, Mississippi. The rest really seemed to know and care about art.

But the only painting anybody wanted was “Crucifixion in Rome.” The Cincinnati Art Museum bought it for not much money, and the museum wanted it not because its greatness was so evident, I’m sure, but because it
had been painted by a native of Cincinnati. It was a tiny thing, about the size of a shirt cardboard—about the size of Father’s work in progress, the nude in his Vienna studio.

John Rettig, in fact, died in the year I was born, which was 1932. Unlike me, he got out of his hometown and stayed out. He took off for the Near East and then Europe, and he finally settled in Volendam, Holland. That became his home, and that was where Father discovered him before the First World War.

Volendam was John Rettig’s Katmandu. When Father met him, this man from Cincinnati was wearing wooden shoes.

•   •   •

“Crucifixion in Rome” is signed “John Rettig,” and it is dated 1888. So it was painted four years before Father was born. Father must have bought it in 1913 or so. Felix thinks there is a possibility that Hitler was with Father on that skylarking trip to Holland. Maybe so.

“Crucifixion in Rome” is indeed set in Rome, which I have never seen. I know enough, though, to recognize that it is chock-a-block with architectural anachronisms. The Colosseum, for example, is in perfect repair, but there is also the spire of a Christian church, and some architectural details and monuments which appear to be more recent, even, than the Renaissance, maybe even nineteenth century. There are sixty-eight tiny but distinct human figures taking part in some sort of celebration amid all this architecture and sculpture. Felix and I counted them
one time, when we were young. Hundreds more are implied by impressionistic smears and dots. Banners fly. Walls are festooned with ropes of leaves. What fun.

Only if you look closely at the painting will you realize that two of the sixty-eight figures are not having such a good time. They are in the lower left-hand corner, and are harmonious with the rest of the composition, but they have in fact just been hung from crosses.

The picture is a comment, I suppose, but certainly a bland one, on man’s festive inhumanity to men—even into what to John Rettig were modern times.

It has the same general theme, I guess, of Picasso’s “Guernica,” which I have seen. I went to see “Guernica” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, during a lull in the rehearsals of
Katmandu
.

Some picture!

I
WENT FOR A WALK
through hospital corridors all alone after Father died. A few people may or may not have murmured “Deadeye Dick” behind my back. It was a busy place.

I came upon strange beauty unexpectedly in a fourth-floor cul-de-sac. It was in a dazzlingly sunny patients’ lounge. The unexpected beauty was in the form of Celia Hoover, née Hildreth, again. She had fallen asleep on a couch, and her eleven-year-old son was watching over her. She had evidently brought him with her to the hospital, rather than leave him alone at home in the blizzard.

He was seated stiffly on the edge of the couch. Even in sleep, she was keeping him captive. She was holding his hand. I had the feeling that, if he had tried to get up, she would have awakened enough to make him sit back down again.

That seemed all right with him.

•   •   •

Yes—well—and ten years later, in 1970, that same boy would be a notorious homosexual, living away from home in the old Fairchild Hotel. His father, Dwayne Hoover, had disowned him. His mother had become a recluse. He eked out a living as a piano player at night in the Tally-ho Room of the new Holiday Inn.

I was again what I had been before the fiasco of my play in New York, the all-night man at Schramm’s Drugstore. Father was buried in Calvary Cemetery, not all that far from Eloise Metzger. We buried him in a painter’s smock, and with his left thumb hooked through a palette. Why not?

The city had taken the old carriage house for fifteen years of back taxes. The first floor now sheltered the carcasses of trucks and buses which were being cannibalized for parts. The upper floors were dead storage for documents relating to transactions by the city before the First World War.