Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

When one of us said “Why do you have to be so cheap?” he raised his hand and said “Shut your trap, you nobody,” but never once hit any of us except a few times with a newspaper.

He gave my mother spending money every Friday at the dinner table. He’d come home, scrub his hands, sit down, take out his wallet and say “Here, for the week.” Sometimes she’d say she didn’t know how she could keep the house running on so little, and he’d say something like “What, what I gave isn’t enough? Okay, then — take everything I got,” and throw some more bills across the table at her or slap the money down in front of him and tell one of the kids “Pass it to your mother.”

In a good mood, he’d take a wad of bills out of his pants pocket, unwrap the rubber band around it and say They aren’t all ones either. Who’s gonna count what I took in just for today?” When one of my brothers or sisters would give the figure, he’d say to us “See why I want all my sons to be dentists?”

They argued at least twice a week at the dinner table. When it got really bad I’d get up and start to bring my dishes into the kitchen, and he’d say “Where you going? You didn’t excuse yourself.” I’d say “May I please be excused?” and he’d say “Get the hell out of here if you can’t take it.”

He’d eat the half a grapefruit right down to the white rind, then hold it up, squeeze it in half and drink the juice left in it straight into his mouth.

Got arrested for steering, for a cut of the fee, his patients or women they knew to doctor friends for illegal abortions. He spent two years in prison, lost his dental license and had to give up his practice, and went broke paying for his lawyers.

“Did it standing on one foot,” he liked to say about his prison term, but that was all he spoke about it except that he met lots of very respectable and educated people there—“Judges, important businessmen and politicians”—many of whom will be future patients of his, he said, once he gets back his license.

“If I had a nickel I’d build a fence around it,” he said whenever we asked him for one, and then he usually gave.

Insisted we kiss him till his dying day, he used to say, “just as I did with my father.”

“Pick me a winner,” he’d say when I put my finger in my nose. “Get me a green one this time,” he also used to say, if he didn’t say the “pick me a winner” line.

I was ashamed of his frayed pants cuffs and shirt collars, stained ties and pants, broken shoelaces and other men’s shoes he wore. Dead men’s shoes, given to him by their widows, of several sizes from a too tight to a floppy 11.

“He’s a diamond in the rough,” his best friend told my mother before they got married, “who’ll continue to adore his mother much more than he ever will you.”

He said he was happiest when he was at his office, seeing a stream of cronies there, and working on people’s teeth, especially extracting a deep-rooted tooth out of a big man’s jaw. “If I can pull it out with no Novocain, even better. I’ve been blessed with two strong quick wrists to do it, if the guy sits tight, with little bleeding or pain and no swelling after.”

Pulled one of my mother’s molars out two nights before their wedding. “In her parents’ kitchen,” he said, “and without anesthetic. She was an ideal patient; not a tear or peep.”

He supposedly had a woman or two on the side now and then, my mother said, but she never believed it: “He was too stingy to.”

To keep what little hair was left on top of his head, she massaged his scalp several nights a week for years.

“I’ll admit,” she said, “your father and I never had a problem in bed, except when he’d been terrible to me that day. But he always said ‘Let’s work things out before we go to sleep so we can have nice dreams and wake up okay,’ and for the most part we did.”

Rare times we saw him loaded, and it always seemed to be after they came home from the annual Grand Street Boys gala, he’d throw all his change on the kitchen floor for us to pick up and keep. Then my mother would usually say That proves your father’s had too much to drink. Always when there’s an open bar. One of you want to help me get him into bed?”

I can’t remember him ever holding my hand when I was young, teaching me a sport, helping me with my homework, seeing one of my teachers, taking me to a ballgame or park, stopping to talk to me on the street, going anywhere alone with me but once a year to buy me clothes wholesale at a patient’s factory downtown. He did used to take a couple of us to Broadway shows once or twice a year because the theater manager, for free dental work, would give us seats that hadn’t been sold. We’d show up in the lobby about twenty minutes before the play began, the manager would be called out, he’d say “Let’s see if anything’s available,” and we’d wait while he checked. There were always seats for us, though we’d have to be split up, my brother or sister and I in the balcony, my father in the orchestra.

“It’s not what you know but who you know”—quote he used most. Or “Remember this: it’ll help you out in life. It’s not what you know but who.”

“I failed with my sons when none of them went into dentistry,” he used to say. “Artists you had to be. Writers, reporters, part of the intellectual elite. You’ll all learn soon enough that you went wrong, but by then you’ll be stuck for the rest of your lives at what you’re doing.”

He’d stand me up on the kitchen counter in front of his friends and say “Sing ‘God Bless America’ for us.” His friends would applaud when I was done and give me a nickel or dime each. One man gave me a new dollar bill once. My father took it from me and said “Better I keep it for you for the time being. Otherwise, you’ll lose it.” When I asked him for it a while later, he said “What dollar you talking about? I’ve given you way more in change over the last few weeks. All you kids ever ask me for is money.”

He used the word “schwartzer,” and I said “You shouldn’t say that word.” He said “What’re telling me, that I’m prejudiced, against them? I’m not. They’re in fact great patients, paying up much faster than the Hebes and never once bouncing a check.”

Three of his five siblings died of diphtheria and influenza when they were very young. His surviving brother looked like a wolf and was a bookie most of his life and died of a blood clot in his brain when he walked into a streetlight pole. His sister came to the apartment one Sunday a month with a jar of glutinous soup she made and greasy cookies and onion rolls she baked that were still warm. They always spent at least an hour alone together, talking very low so no one would hear them. After she left, my mother said things like “I wonder how much cash she got out of your dad this time after one of her sob stories. He’s a sucker for everything she says, just as he was for his mother.” Or “I can imagine the loathsome things she said about me and which your dad, of course, let her get away with. I never liked his family. Only his father. A sweeter, sadder shlep never lived.”

He liked to call me “junior boy” because I was small for my age and the fourth and last son. At first I liked it — he said it affectionately and sometimes rubbed my hair. But when I got into my mid-teens I asked him to stop calling me it — it made me seem too boyish. He said “I can’t; it’s gotten into my blood.” “Junior boy, junior boy,” he’d say mockingly when I was in my twenties and angry for one reason or another or indignant over something, usually politics or the state of culture.

“You can fall in love with a rich girl as well as a poor one,” he said, “so why not one with money? But never bring home a girl of whatever financial means who’s not Jewish.”