Evan Hunter - Far From the Sea

Whatever the psychological roots of his word games, they never ceased. When he caught David smoking for the first time, he said, “Put out that cigarette before you make an ash of yourself.” He described an inept tailor on Fordham Road as a man “panting for customers,” and then compounded the felony by adding, “ill-suited to his trade.” Of an uppity barber, he said, “He thinks he’s hair to the throne,” which was better, but only somewhat, than his constant remark about his own baldness, “Oh, well, hair today, gone tomorrow.” He punned interminably and often outrageously. When his brother Max caught a trout he claimed was two feet long, David’s father said, “You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?” and then immediately added, “Well, maybe I will, just for the halibut.” When his cousin Bernice began cheating on her violinist husband, David’s father said, “He’s fiddling while Bernice roams.” The first time he met Molly (but that was another story) and learned she was a nurse, he said, “I’ve always wanted a panhandler in the family.”

During the trial David had just lost, opposing counsel was a man who prefaced each of his harangues by first removing his eyeglasses and then jabbing them in a witness’s face whenever he posed a question. In objecting to one such verbal and physical attack, David said, “Your Honor, my brother is harassing the witness,” and then could not resist adding, “and he’s also making a spectacle of himself,” which the judge did not find amusing. (“Chip off the old block. Ike and Mike, we look alike.”) But back in 1943, when his father came up with the “MRS. KATZ” headline and despite the fact that his mother’s maiden name had been Katz — was there more to the headline than David guessed? — he’d thought it was the cat’s meow. (“What has four legs and follows cats?” his father asked that very same day. “What?” David said. “Mrs. Katz and her lawyer!” his father bellowed in triumph. Jesus!) In fact, David believed that the headline, together with a gossip column about all the kids in the neighborhood, was what sold out the first issue. They made fourteen dollars on that first issue because there were ads in it from all the neighborhood merchants, including one for David’s father’s clothing store that was about to fold in the fall, a full-page ad that had cost a dollar. The newspaper suspended publication after its second issue, but only because David dropped the Hectograph tray one afternoon and the now thoroughly purple jelly spilled out all over the floor. “That jelly’s gonna get you in a jam,” his father said, smiling, even though he’d already hand-lettered his way through half of the third issue.

His father had good penmanship (“I like to keep my hand in,” he said), and he was a good letterer as well (“A man of letters,” he said), a skill he had acquired when making signs for the front windows of all his failed businesses. David’s mother yelled that he’d ruined the rug on the floor of the room where his father kept all his collected junk and which had been the newspaper office. David said he would give her all the paper’s profits to have the rug cleaned. His mother graciously declined the offer, but she never stopped telling everyone how David had spilled all that purple shmutz on the heirloom rug her grandmother had carried on her back all the way from Russia — “See the stain? You can still see it. This is exactly where he dropped the tray.”

His father said, “That stain has real stayin’ power,” which was reaching, even for him.

His father used to cheat at poker.

His poker game was on Wednesday nights, a floating game that met at their house every seventh Wednesday. If David had finished his homework, his father would let him pull up a chair beside him, and he would explain all the poker hands to him. The men played for pennies; none of them could afford higher stakes. But every now and then, David noticed his father shortchanging the pot when he put his “lights” in. Each time, his father gave him a little wink that meant he was just kidding around, there wasn’t any real theft involved here, he was just putting one over on these wisenheimers. “A penny saved is a penny urned,” he said, whenever he dropped a coin into David’s piggy bank. It took David years and years to realize he was making another pun, a rather literary one at that since its appreciation depended on visual input. His father’s cheating delighted him. He kept fearfully waiting for the other men in the game to catch his father at it, but they never did. His father invariably won. Years later, when David was on the troopship heading for Inchon and monumental poker games were being played on blankets all over the deck, David wished his father were there with him. His father would have cleaned out all those fancy gamblers in a minute.

Everything about his father had delighted David when he was a boy.

He wondered when it all had changed.

He wondered when his father had become a pain in the ass.

The waiting room, and his father’s room, and his own room at the hotel were beginning to blend into a single unit. The only reason David went back to the hotel between visiting hours was to get away from the hospital, but the hotel room was becoming an extension of the hospital. He had been here only since yesterday afternoon, and already his life was ordered by the sign on the waiting room door:

The other people in the waiting room seemed to spend their entire day there, watching television, talking to each other or to whichever pink lady was at the desk, going down for lunch in the hospital coffee shop, returning to wait for the two o’clock and then the four o’clock, and only then leaving the hospital to return later for the seven o’clock. Their patience was infinite; they all had people who were maybe dying in there.

He sat beside Bessie on one of the leatherette couches and listened to the voices all around him.

“My mother hit me this morning,” the thin woman with the flushed, excited face said. This was shortly before the two o’clock visit. Or perhaps the four o’clock. It was all becoming a blur for him. “She wants to go home, she hit me. I don’t know if I’ll come to see her again. She gets upset whenever I come. Maybe it’s better if I stay home.”

“No,” the pale woman in the wedgies said. Her daughter was not here today. Neither was the man from Toronto; David assumed he had already flown his comatose wife back to Canada. “You have to keep coming. They can carry on all they want, but they like to see you.”

“I don’t think she likes to see me,” the other woman said, and lit a cigarette. “I really don’t think so. If she likes me so much, why does she take a fit every time I come?”

“Because you’re the only one she can take it out on.”

He was beginning to learn their names. The pale woman in the wedgies, the one whose husband had had open-heart surgery twice, was Mrs. Daniels. Her fat daughter, who was not here this afternoon because her little girl had a ballet recital, was named Louise. David did not yet know her last name. The woman with the flushed face, the one whose mother had come in for a simple hernia operation and who was now violently insisting that she be taken home, was Mrs. Horowitz. She smoked even more than David did. There were other people in the waiting room now, strangers, the way Mrs. Daniels and her daughter and Mrs. Horowitz had been strangers to him yesterday. On the television screen, a man wearing a tuxedo was talking to a woman in a slinky evening gown. They were both sipping brandy from large snifters.