Renata Adler - Speedboat

The athletes among us were extremely delicate, subject to injuries and colds. Avalanches fell on them. Their stomachs were easily upset. When Ralph’s girl left him for a year in Paris, he, after two beers, leaped over a cliff and missed whatever he muzzily thought of as his destination, and hit a tree, and broke his jaw in sixteen places. His girl returned to him. His jaw was wired. He got the flu. When we were younger, we all thought we liked to swim. Tired, shivering, we pleaded to stay in. Now, at the fifth stroke of what begins as a brazen crawl, my feet sink. I have to swim some other stroke. Once, Alice, a true and natural athlete, jumped into the pool of a hotel outside Palermo and swam her crawl. She had already played an hour of tennis, and ridden one of the furry island horses. She felt that her exercise for the day was not complete. So she swam. At her third lap of the long pool, an Italian, who had been lying in the sun, simply could no longer stand it. He dived in, began the crawl. They did two laps, Alice in the lead. At her fifth lap, he was already half a pool behind her. He speeded up. His feet were lagging. At her nineteenth lap, he gave it up. He was enraged. In her energy, her good nature, her athleticism, Alice sometimes forgets that we are not all alike. Just recently, she took Idris to the kitchen to show him what she called a beautiful surprise. Idris is the most cultivated, gentle, pacific man we know; he also is a vegetarian. Alice opened the refrigerator door and there, looking alert and almost confiding, was, from her last hunt, the head of a decapitated fox.

The child of nature, with a sunburned stomach and dirt on its wrists, had followed the wrong fur sleeve at the supermarket. He was now quite lost. He began to sob, wetly, hysterically — not like a scared, lost child but in the manner of a tyrannical, mean, accusatory brat. “You’re not my mother,” he began to shout, a natural informer, at the pale, wrong lady in the near fur coat, and then, “She’s not my mother,” when he had gathered a sympathetic little crowd. “Lady, are you this kid’s mother?” the supermarket manager asked the lady. She said she wasn’t. He said, “Well, then why don’t you leave him alone?” When Sally, one of our legal reporters, went to the hospital for a hysterectomy, we visited her by turns. Carl was there on the second afternoon. When the nurse asked him to leave the room for a moment, he naturally left. “Now, Mother, here we are,” the nurse said. She brought somebody’s baby in. Sally, who does have two children, was confused. She said, “Wait, just a minute.” The nurse cooed. Sally pointed out that the baby wasn’t hers. “Now, Mother,” the nurse said, “in large hospitals we often think that. But baby knows. Baby has a wristlet.” Then she looked at the wristlet, said “Oh, now,” one last time, and, holding the baby, walked out.

“Harry,” the blonde said, waving her drink and putting out her cigarette, “do you realize you have made yourself into a person that one has to lie to?”

“Janine,” he said, “you know I’m very tired of your aperçus? ”

What was mortifying was the limbo dancing. What was mortifying was the fat, hot, drunk, sunburned and flattered man at whom the calypso lyrics were directed. What was mortifying was the way his wife danced with the famous, tense, witless insult comedian. What was mortifying was the insinuating child who recited “Horatio at the Bridge” in its entirety. “Sweetie,” the blonde screamed from the dance floor to her adolescent grandson, “isn’t this fun?”

I never liked him, and now he is dead. Perhaps I should wish that I had liked him better. But I do not wish it. And I did not like him. I was not asked, which is just as well. What he was, was asleep. So they should not have buried him. Hindsight is easy. Mistakes will happen. It was one of a series of errors that marked his whole life. Not the last error, it now seems. His will is under litigation. The penultimate error, perhaps.

It was his misfortune to die during the strike of the Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendants Union — oddly enough, in this city, Local 365. I covered the meeting at which the strike ended. The men had not tended a grave or buried a body in months. The head of the local, in describing his problems, with the diocese, the bereaved, the bureaus of public health and sanitation, spoke eloquently of “this tragic backlog” and “this extra grief.” At Mount Carmel, Calvary, Cyprus Hills, there had been vandalism. The unburied coolly bided their time. The trouble is he was our candidate, Jim’s candidate really. It can’t be helped. That is all.

Our anachronism. The young uptown doctor found his standard of living drastically threatened by the change in the law. He had worked hard through his schooling, internship, and residency. He had married a girl he had met at a mixer, at Goucher. They had settled in Rye. Every Thursday night, beginning at midnight and ending at eight in the morning, he had been performing abortions, for years. The rates he had charged had not been steep, when compared with the cost of a trip to some other country. Occasionally, for a young actress out of work or some other demonstrably poor patient, he had done the operation for free. On some Thursday nights, there were only two patients. Sometimes, in the fall, there were seven. His preferred number for any Thursday night was four. He called all his patients — the Thursday night ones and those in his regular practice — by their first names. He insisted that they call him Ned. When abortion in New York became legal, Ned, never having thought of the problem in these terms, faced the prospect of having his income reduced by two thousand dollars a week, cash.

He had never been a man without scruples. The legal risk he had taken, through the years, for his patients, a sense that sane, prosperous men did not pay taxes on cash income, and a vague liberal perception that it was not altogether right to support an already too powerful government — these had combined in Ned’s thoughts into a moral certainty that his Thursday-night income was not subject to the income tax. He had, anyway, of late been taking losses in the market. Sheila, his wife, was in analysis. His two daughters were in therapy. His son — he did not know what to think about his son. At five, the boy already lacked stamina, lacked ambition. He seemed a happy little boy, but there was no question that he was far behind Doug and Netta Forster’s five-year-old in intellectual development and motor control. He was also far less tall. Doug was Ned’s best friend, and Ned had hated him since their earliest childhood. Doug had been something of an athlete. Doug had won full scholarships for college and medical school. It was true that Ned had not required scholarships, but the fact was that he had not had them. In the Army, Doug had met somebody with whom he had invested in real estate in Arizona. Ever since, it seemed clear that he was marginally richer than Ned had ever been. To conceal this fact, this disparity, had so far been the most expensive proposition of Ned and Sheila’s lives.

When the law changed, Ned had to consider these and other enormous pressures. He decided to make no concession whatever to that change. He needed the money. He had ten years of Thursday-night patients as evidence that, when they needed him, he was a good and kindly man. Patients trusted him, just as they always had, just as they should have. When a girl or a woman now came to him, not wanting to be pregnant and believing that she was, he told her to come to his office Thursday night. In a very short time, he found himself instructing patients to do this, whether the tests showed they were actually pregnant or not. He justified this to himself in a number of ways. He was busy. They were anxious. For patients beyond their early twenties, the operation might be advisable anyway. Or he could use the occasion to install an intrauterine device.