Everyman (12 page)

Her beauty, frail to begin with, was smashed and broken, and tall as she was, under the hospital sheets she looked shrunken and already on the way to decomposing. How could the doctor dare to tell Nancy that the mercilessness of what had befallen her mother would leave no enduring mark? He leaned forward to touch her hair, her soft white hair, doing his best not to cry himself and remembering again—the migraines, Nancy's birth, the day he'd come upon Phoebe Lambert at the agency, fresh, frightened, intriguingly innocent, a properly raised girl and, unlike Cecilia, unclouded by a crushing history of childhood chaos, everything about her sound and sane, blessedly not prone to outbursts, and yet without her being at all simple: the very best in the way of naturalness that Quaker Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College could produce. He remembered her reciting from memory for him, unostentatiously and in flawless Middle English, the prologue to
The Canterbury Tales
and, too, the surprising antique locutions she'd picked up from her starchy father, things like "We must be at pains to understand this" and "It is not going too far to say," which could have made him fall for her even without that first glimpse of her striding single-mindedly by his open office door, a mature young woman, the only one in the office who wore no lipstick, tall and bosomless, her fair hair pulled back to reveal the length of her neck and the delicate small-lobed ears of a child. "Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so, and you're so unaware of your charm." "There's so much to learn," she said while he accompanied her home in the taxi; when he replied softly, without a trace of the urgency he felt, "I'll teach you," she had to cover her face with her hands. "I'm blushing. I blush," she said. "Who doesn't?" he told her, and he believed that she'd blushed because she thought he was referring not to the subject of their conversation—all the art she'd never seen—but to sexual ardor, as indeed he was. He wasn't thinking in the taxi of showing her the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum but of her long fingers and her wide mouth, though soon enough he'd take her not just to the Metropolitan but to the Modern, the Frick, and the Guggenheim. He remembered her removing her bathing suit out of sight in the dunes. He remembered them, later in the afternoon, swimming back together across the bay. He remembered how everything about this candid, unaffected woman was so unpredictably exciting. He remembered the nobility of her straightness. Against her own grain, she sparkled. He recalled telling her, "I can't live without you," and Phoebe's replying, "Nobody has ever said that to me before," and his admitting, "I've never said it before myself."

The summer of 1967. She was twenty-six.

Then the next day came news of the former colleagues, the same men he worked with and often ate lunch alongside while they were all with the agency. One was a creative supervisor named Brad Karr, who'd been hospitalized for suicidal depression; the second was Ezra Pollock, who had terminal cancer at seventy; and the third, his boss, was a gentle, lucid bigwig who walked around with the company's most profitable accounts in his pocket, who was almost maternal toward his favorites, who had been suffering for years with heart trouble and the aftereffects of a stroke, and whose picture he was stunned to see in the obituary section of the
Times:
"Clarence Spraco, Wartime Eisenhower Aide and Advertising Innovator, Dies at 84."

He immediately called Clarence's wife at their retirement home up in the Berkshires.

"Hello, Gwen," he said.

"Hi, dear. How are you?"

"I'm okay. How are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm doing all right. My kids came. I have a lot of company. And a lot of help. There are so many things I could tell you. In a sense, I was prepared, and in a way one never is. When I came home I found him dead on the floor, and that was a terrible shock. He had been dead for a couple of hours at that point. He seemed to have died at lunchtime. I had gone out for lunch, and so forth. You know, for him it was a good end. It was sudden, and he didn't have another stroke that would have debilitated him and put him in the hospital."

"Was it a stroke or was it a heart attack?" he asked her.

"It was a myocardial infarct."

"Had he been feeling ill?"

"Well, his blood pressure had been—well, he had a lot of trouble with his blood pressure. And then this past weekend he wasn't feeling so great. His blood pressure had gone up again."

"They couldn't control that with drugs?"

"They did. He took all kinds of drugs. But he probably had a lot of arterial damage. You know, bad old arteries, and there's a point at which the body wears out. And he was so weary at that point. He said to me just a couple of nights ago, 'I'm so weary.' He wanted to live, but there wasn't anything anybody could do to keep him alive any longer. Old age is a battle, dear, if not with this, then with that. It's an unrelenting battle, and just when you're at your weakest and least able to call up your old fight."

"That was a very nice tribute to him in the obituary today. They recognized that he was someone special. I wish I'd had a chance to tell them a few things about his wonderful ability to recognize the value of the people who worked with him. I saw his picture today," he said, "and I remembered a day years ago when a client had taken me to lunch at the Four Seasons, and we were heading down those stairs into the lobby there, and we bumped into Clarence. And my client was feeling expansive and he said, 'Clarence, how are you? Do you know this young art director?' And Clarence said, 'I do. Thank God I do. Thank God the agency does.' He did this again and again, and not just with me."

"He had the highest regard for you, dear. He meant every word of that. I remember," she said, "how he plucked you out of the bullpen when you weren't at the agency even a year. He came home and told me about you. Clarence had an eye for creative talent, and he plucked you out of the bullpen and made you into an art director before you'd even completed your penal servitude working on brochures."

"He was good to me. I always thought of him as the general."

"He'd only been a colonel under Eisenhower."

"He was a general to me. I could tell you dozens of things that are in my mind now." Clarence's suggestion that he fuck his secretary in her apartment rather than in his office wasn't among them.

"Please do. When you talk about him, it's as if he's still here," Gwen said.

"Well, there was the time when we worked and worked every night for two or three weeks until after midnight, sometimes until two or three in the morning, for the Mercedes-Benz pitch. This was really one of the big ones, and we worked like hell, and we didn't get it. But when it was over Clarence said to me, 'I want you and your wife to go to London for a long weekend. I want you to stay at the Savoy because it's my favorite hotel, and I want you and Phoebe to have dinner at the Connaught. And it's on me.' In those days, this was a huge gift, and he gave it even though we'd lost the account. I wish I could have told that to the papers, and all the stories like it."

"Well, the press has been superb," Gwen said. "Even up here. There was an article about him in today's
Berkshire Eagle.
It was long, with a wonderful picture, and very laudatory. They made much of what he'd done in the war and about his being the army's youngest full colonel. I think Clarence would have been amused and contented by the recognition he's gotten."

"Look, you sound, for the moment, okay."

"Well, of course, it's okay now—I'm busy and I've got lots of company. The hard part is going to be when I'm alone."

"What are you going to do? Are you going to stay on in Massachusetts?"

"Yes, I am, for now. I discussed it with Clarence. I said, 'If I'm the one who's left, I'm going to sell the house and go back to New York.' But the kids want me not to do that, because they think I ought to give myself a year."

"Probably they're right. People regret, sometimes, the actions they take right off."

"I think so," she said. "And how is Nancy?"

"She's fine."

"Whenever I think of Nancy as a child, a smile comes to my face. She was pure life. I remember the two of you singing 'Smile' together at our house. We were living in Turtle Bay. It was an afternoon so long ago. You'd taught it to her. She must have been all of six. 'Smile, tho' your heart is aching'—how does it go?—'smile even tho' it's breaking—' You bought her the Nat 'King' Cole record. Remember? I do."

"I do too."

"Does she? Does Nancy?"

"I'm sure she does. Gwen, my heart and thoughts are with you."

"Thank you, dear. So many people have called. The phone has been going steadily for two days. So many people have wept, so many people have told me what he meant to them. If Clarence could only see all this. He knew his value to the company, but you know he also needed the same reassurances that everyone needs in this world."

"Well, he was awfully important to all of us. Look, we'll talk more," he said.

"Okay, dear. I so appreciate your calling."

It took him a while to go back to the phone with a voice he could trust. Brad Karr's wife told him the Manhattan hospital where Brad was a psychiatric patient. He was able to dial Brad's room directly, remembering as he did the time they'd done that slice-of-life commercial for Maxwell House coffee, when they were kids in their twenties, just starting out together, teamed up as a copywriter and an art director, and they broke the bank on the day-after recall score. They got a 34, the highest score in the history of Maxwell House. It was the day of the group Christmas party, and Brad, knowing Clarence would be coming, had his sidekick make cardboard buttons saying "34," and everybody wore them, and Clarence stopped by just to congratulate Brad and him and even put on a button, and they were on their way.

"Hello, Brad? Your old buddy calling from the Jersey Shore."

"Hi. Hello there."

"What's up, kid? I called your house a few minutes ago. I just had a yen to talk to you after all this time, and Mary told me you were in the hospital. That's how I've reached you. How are you doing?"

"Well, I'm doing all right. As such things go."

"How are you feeling?"

"Well, there are better places to be."

"Is it awful?"

"It could be worse. I mean, this happens to be a pretty good one. It's okay. I don't recommend it for a holiday, but it's been all right."

"How long have you been there?"

"Oh, about a week." Mary Karr had just told him that it had been a month at this point, and that it was his second stay in a year, and that things hadn't been so great in between. Brad's speech was very slow and faltering—probably from the medication—and heavy with hopelessness. "I expect I'll be out soon," he said.

"What do you do all day?"

"Oh, you cut out paper dolls. Things like that. I wander up and down the hallways. Try to keep my sanity."

"What else?"

"Take therapy. Take drugs. I feel like I'm a depository for every drug you can name."

"In addition to the antidepressant, there's other stuff?"

"Yeah. It's mostly a downer. It's not the tranquilizers, it's the antidepressants. They're working, I think."

"Are you able to sleep?"

"Oh yeah. At first there was a little problem, but now they've gotten that part straightened out."

"Do you talk to a doctor during the day?"

"Yeah." Brad laughed, and for the first time sounded something like himself. "He doesn't do any good. He's nice. He tells you to buck up and everything's going to be all right."

"Bradford, remember when you were pissed at Clarence about something and gave him two weeks' notice? I told you not to leave. You said, 'But I've resigned.' 'Rescind your resignation,' I said. And you did. Who else but Clarence and what other agency would have put up with that crap from a copywriter? You did it twice, as I remember. And stayed another ten years."

He'd gotten Brad to laugh again. "Yeah, I was always nuts," Brad said.

"We worked together for a lot of years. Endless silent hours together, hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands and thousands of silent hours together in your office or mine trying to figure things out."

"That was something," Brad said.

"You bet it was.
You
were something. And don't forget it."

"Thanks, buddy."

"And so what about leaving?" he asked Brad. "When do you think that's going to happen?"

"Well, I don't really know. I imagine it's a matter of a couple of weeks. Since I've been here I've been far less depressed than when I was out. I feel almost composed. I think I'm going to recover."

"That's good news. I'll call you again. I hope to speak to you under better circumstances very shortly."

"Okay. Thanks for calling," Brad said. "Thanks a lot. I'm awfully glad you called."

After hanging up, he wondered: Did he know it was me? Did he truly remember what I remembered? From the voice alone I can't imagine he'll ever get out of there.

Then the third call. He couldn't stop himself from making it, though learning of Brad's hospitalization and Clarence's death and seeing the damage caused by Phoebe's stroke had given him enough to ponder for a while. As did Gwen's reminding him of his teaching Nancy to sing "Smile" like Nat "King" Cole. This call was to Ezra Pollock, who wasn't expected to live out the month but who, astonishingly, when he answered the phone, sounded like someone happy and fulfilled and no less cocky than usual.

"Ez," he said, "what's cookin'? You sound elated."

"I rise to conversation because conversation is my only recreation."

"And you're not depressed?"

"Not at all. I don't have time to be depressed. I'm all concentration." Laughing, Ezra said, "I see through everything now."

"Yourself included?"

"Yes, believe it or not. I've stripped away my bullshit and I'm getting down to brass tacks at last. I've begun my memoir of the advertising business. Before you go, you've got to face the facts, Ace. If I live, I'll write some good stuff."