Last Respects (45 page)

“What?” I said. What would you have said?

“The army does not like to draft men who wet their beds,” Dr. McCarran said.

The effects of human speech are, of course, as unpredictable as the effects of nuclear fission. I have no doubt that to Dr. McCarran his simple statement was no more startling than the dropping of The Bomb over Hiroshima had been to the pilot of the
Enola Gay.
We were fighting a war. When you fight a war you have to win. The methods are not your concern. You just follow orders.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s wrong with wetting the bed?”

Dr. McCarran gave me a look that had in it patience, because he was obviously a decent human being, but the look had in it also a number of not quite definable elements. They belonged to that area in which people with specialized knowledge, people like doctors, come to know so much about the human condition that they find it difficult to discuss the condition with even well-intentioned dumbbells.

“There is nothing wrong with wetting the bed in a private bedroom,” Dr. McCarran said patiently. “In a barracks, however, a large chamber inhabited by dozens of men, wetting the bed is a disruptive act. It is a subject for ridicule. Ridicule destroys discipline. The army looks with disfavor upon the disruption of discipline. In fact, the army looks upon the destruction of discipline the way the priests of your race, Mr. Kramer, look upon the desecration of the Torah. The army wants men. But the army does not want men who wet their beds.”

Another good thing about N.Y.U. Law School. It teaches you to put things together. It did in 1933-1937, anyway.

“So if you tell the army you wet your bed,” I said, “the army will not draft you?”

Dr. McCarran nodded. But I noticed his face looked troubled.

“Not quite,” he said. “If to stay out of the army all a young man has to do is say he wets the bed, we would never have an army. It’s an easy lie. So the army employs doctors.”

The troubled look cut deeper furrows into Dr. McCarran’s marvelous Osgood Perkins face.

“I was one of those doctors,” he said. “The way I got to know Seb was that many actors, friends of his, wanted to stay out of the army, and they knew about the bed-wetting bit, but they didn’t know how to, how shall I put it, yes, they didn’t know how to activate it into plausibility.”

I gave that a bit of thought. Dr. McCarran had obviously grown accustomed to visitors or patients who, at this point, needed a bit of thought. He pulled the fat silver stopper out of an expensive Abercrombie & Fitch thermos jug and poured himself a glass of ice water. He did not offer one to his visitor. I understood why he did not. At this point in a puzzling situation the visitor did not want ice water. Why waste time?

“The problem, then,” I said, “would seem to be how to convince the army doctors, when a man says he wets his bed, how to convince the army doctors he is telling the truth. Is that correct?”

Dr. McCarran was so clearly pleased with me, that I was pleased with myself.

“Mr. Kramer,” he said, “you have not only put your finger on it. You have poked a hole right through it. Bull’s-eye!”

“So you worked out a system,” I said. “How to check on men who say they wet their beds to find out if they are lying, or if they really do wet their beds.”

“Precisely,” said Dr. McCarran. “I am not proud about this. But I wanted my country to beat the pants off a son of a bitch named Hitler. I hated that louse. I still do. I would have done anything to help. What I was able to do was track down poor kids who said they peed in bed but actually didn’t. Isn’t that insane?”

I could see from his face that he intended it to be a serious question. I had come to him about a problem that had been shaking the hell out of me. I saw that in his attempt to help me solve it, I was shaking the hell out of him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If you saved some kids from dying, it can’t be insane.”

“Because you want me to save your son from dying,” Dr. McCarran said.

He could have been behind the A&P counter asking me how many bunches of asparagus I wanted.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I don’t want that kid to die. Any more than my parents wanted me to die in the war that was yours and mine. But my parents didn’t try to stop me. My mother and father would have considered it a dirty thing to do what I’m doing here today. You see, my mother and father were immigrants. They had escaped from Europe on the run. With murderous bastards like Hitler breathing down their necks. My mother and father made it. Others didn’t. My mother and father understood why it was necessary to fight savages like Hitler. They were proud to have their son in that fight. Their son is still proud that he was. But I’m not proud of this war. I’m ashamed of it. We’re not wiping out an evil like Hitler. This time we’re the evil. I don’t want my son to be a part of it. He’s going to die some day. Everybody dies, including you and me. But I’m damned if I’m going to let him die as a part of this plague. To save him from that I’ll do anything, Dr. McCarran.”

Dr. McCarran stared at me for a moment, or a minute, or an hour. I don’t know. My heart was hammering so hard I couldn’t count time.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Sebastian Roon vouches for you.”

“He is my son’s godfather,” I said.

“Your son couldn’t have a better one,” Dr. McCarran said.

He lifted the green blotter on his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was not a letterhead. Just a sheet of white paper. And I could see it had about twenty or thirty typewritten lines on it.

“These are the questions I worked out during the crusade against Hitler,” he said. Not without irony. “To check the veracity of a boy who told his draft board doctor he peed in bed. And I’ve written down the answers. All your son has to do at his physical exam is rattle off these answers.”

Osgood Perkins—no, sorry—Dr. McCarran bowed his head.

“Christ Almighty,” he said to the green desk blotter. When he lifted his head, I was relieved to see he was not crying. “It’s a pretty rotten way to live,” he said. In a voice so low that I could only just barely hear him. But I did. “Teaching kids how to convince draft board doctors that they pee in bed. Wouldn’t that have made Osler proud of us?”

I didn’t answer. I just took the sheet of paper, stood up, and went to the door. I made it because he held my elbow all the way.

“Tell your son to memorize these simple questions and answers,” Dr. McCarran said. “He won’t be drafted.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I walked back to the Federal Courthouse. One of the most puzzling things about being alive, I have learned slowly, is that there are times when you don’t know what the hell is going on inside your own head. Emotions are too complicated to sort out. They make you feel rudderless. I hate that. I like to feel I am in control. I like to feel I know where I am going. The infuriating truth is that I rarely do. For such moments I always carry the copy of
Bleak House
given to me by Miss Anna Bongiorno in J.H.S. 64 when I reached the semifinals in the New York
Times
oratorical contest on the Constitution in 1924. I did not make it into the finals, but I still have that copy of
Bleak House.
I never leave home without slipping it into my overnight bag. Even before I pack my razor and toothbrush.

You can always, I have found, buy a toothbrush. Or find a barber. But copies of
Bleak House,
I have discovered, are difficult to come by on short notice. So I carry my own, and in spare moments away from home I lean on it. The book gets you through. Art always does. Good art, anyway, and
Bleak House
is up there with the best.

It got me through a long wait in the Federal Courthouse on Walnut Street until I was called to the stand. After half an hour of foolish questions, Mr. Schlisselberger’s Philadelphia lawyer asked if I, as an experienced and well-known New York real-estate lawyer, would or could—no lawyer ever uses one word when two can be squeezed in—tell the court if any new theaters had been built in the Times Square area.

“Not in my time,” I said.

The defense attorney leaped to his feet. “And what, sir, if I may ask,” he thundered (he was a basso, like Ezio Pinza), “what is your time, sir?”

Without thought, because it was simple fact, as much a part of my life as my home address, I said: “April fourth, nineteen thirteen, the day I was born, until today.”

Pause. Defense attorney plops back into his seat, frowning furiously. I wonder why. The judge, a man who has hitherto been for me faceless, leans down from the bench. He proves to have a marvelous face. Plump, but not fat. Lined in a good way. The best way. Like a marbled steak. The lines underscoring the obvious fact that the face has been used. By thought. By worry. By preoccupation with the human condition, which is always troubling and never good. All these lines came together in a friendly smile, the whole head framed in a neatly tended mop of thick white hair.

“Mr. Kramer,” the judge says to me gently, “that’s the only time any of us can testify to.”

So I’m doing it.

The decision was not made. It happened. I caught the four o’clock Metroliner back to New York. I had the afternoon papers. And I had
Bleak House.
But I did not read. I stared out the train window. As anybody who has been subjected to this ride can testify, there is not much to see. Yet the unattractive roadbed from Philadelphia to Penn Station held my attention. I was not, of course, seeing the dreary landscape. I was seeing that judge. His alive, concerned face. And hearing his totally unexpected words. Over and over again. Why?

I don’t know. I had gone to Philadelphia to save the life of my son. To do so I had been forced to involve myself in a fragment of a stupid legal brawl. The only justification for its existence was the wealth of the plaintiff. He could afford to snarl the dockets of the nation’s courts with a piece of idiotic vanity. He could afford to enlist my not inexpensive help in this shameful charade. As the train pulled into Penn Station, the core of what was troubling me surfaced in the form of a question. I wished it hadn’t. The question was: Is this a way for a man to spend his life? The question was addressed to Benny Kramer.

Before I could answer it, things started to happen. There were, of course, no taxis. There have been no taxis at Penn Station since Commodore Perry opened up Japan, though most New Yorkers are either unaware of this fact or refuse to believe it. They emerge from the railroad station into the street, seem astonished to discover that there are no cabs waiting, and do something I feel I have a right to call stupid because I have done it so often myself: they ask a redcap to get one for them.

I did not. After all, I was carrying no luggage. Only
Bleak House.
And I knew more about the area around Penn Station than most redcaps. I had spent my early years in the garment center.

I surveyed the situation. This was a mistake. I should have walked away from it. But the days of my nonage were crowding back into my mind. When I was a boy on these streets the Hotel Pennsylvania had a 33rd Street entrance. And 33rd Street, even when Jimmy Walker was mayor, had always been westbound. Somebody was sure to be arriving at the hotel from the east side. Somebody in a taxi.

I made my move.

I leaped out into the stream of Seventh Avenue traffic. I dodged my way nimbly—every morning: twenty minutes of calisthenics, plus ten minutes of jogging—toward the southeast corner of 33rd Street. A man carrying a suitcase might have had trouble. Not a man carrying
Bleak House.
The prose is uplifting. Halfway across the moving current of savage traffic, I saw a cab do precisely what I had felt some cab would do. It pulled up to the 33rd Street side of the hotel.

A passenger stepped out. The door slammed shut. The cab started moving toward me. At the 33rd Street corner it turned into Seventh Avenue, as I knew it would have to do; Seventh Avenue is now one-way, southbound. I waved
Bleak House.
The taxi pulled up and stopped at my feet. I seized the handle of the rear door and twisted.

Nothing happened. I twisted harder. Nothing. The door was locked. A voice came out of the late afternoon sunlight behind me.

“That’s my cab, white boy.”

I turned. In my youth I was a devotee of the work of Rex Beach. He would have written: “I spun around.” I have a feeling Mr. Beach’s account of my movement would have been more accurate. When I stopped spinning I found myself facing, in the middle of the Seventh Avenue traffic, a black young man in a zipper jacket who was eleven feet tall.

“Oh, no, it’s not,” I said mildly. My mother had taught me to be polite. “I got here first.”

The black man replied by throwing a punch at my nose. I covered it with both hands and with
Bleak House
and I crouched away to the left. The black young man’s fist missed my nose, as well as
Bleak House,
but it grazed the side of my head. My head slammed against the rim of the taxi’s rear window. Time vanished from my consciousness. When I again became aware of it, I grasped that it could not have been gone very long. The young man was still there, right smack in the middle of the insane traffic whoosing by on both sides of us, and he was throwing another punch at my head. It never landed. This black boy, clearly to his amazement as well as mine, had competition.

Behind him another black boy—no, a man: he could have been in his forties or his nineties but he was not in his teens—had taken an interest in me. He was taller and heavier than the boy, and he was carrying what looked like a stunted baseball bat. I learned later it was a long flashlight, but at the moment my capacity to learn was limited to my popped eyes. They showed me the long, sweeping motion of one arm, with which the black man shoved the black boy out of his path, and the way both his hands came together at the bottom of the weapon, swung it up over his head and, like a headsman’s ax, brought it down in the direction of my totally unprotected scalp.

I screamed. I crouched. And something came up out of the past to help me. The memory of that commando course I had been forced to take at a British staging area in Kent shortly before D-day in 1944.