Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“No matter what a cop or teacher smacks you for, you deserve it. Always respect authority.”

This is my youngest boy,” he said to a couple of his cronies in his waiting room. “Maybe not the sharpest of the bunch, but so far the hardest worker and the one most interested in making money, so the son I have the highest hopes of following me into dentistry. If he doesn’t become one, like the other three, I’ll really consider my life a flop.”

“Dad emotionally cool?” my mother said. “It’s just a front. He doesn’t like showing his deeper emotions around you kids. Afraid it’ll give you the wrong way to act and later make you vulnerable to people who take advantage of sensitive men. So he wants to always look chipper and strong, even tough, able to endure and stand up to anything. But weeks after your brother died he was still crying to himself to sleep every night. With his mother, he was even more inconsolable. At least with your brother he let me hold him in my arms sometimes, though don’t let on to him that I told you.”

“Why would you want to move out when you’ve got free room and board here?” he said to me when I started looking for an apartment after I graduated college. “Stay with us till you have a pile of dough in the bank and can afford a long layoff from work. The food’s good, bed’s comfortable, you have your own room now, so if you want to be left alone to type your head off in it, the room’s quiet enough with the door shut where nobody’s going to complain.”

“Don’t be a dope,” he said when I told him I’d stopped signing up for my weekly unemployment insurance check because I was no longer looking for work. “You and your last employer put good money into that plan, so take it while you can. If you were doing something really illegal, that’d make it a different matter. But you want to write and just live off your savings, do it when the government checks run out.”

“I don’t care what you say,” he said, “that girl’s ugly as sin and dull as dishwater and is making a fool of you if you think she’s good-looking and has a nice personality.”

Went through the apartment a few times a night turning off all the lights in rooms nobody was in. “You people,” he’d say, “must think I’ve got stock in Con Edison.”

“Get off the phone,” he’d say on the extension when I was trying to make a date with a girl or talking to a friend. “I’ve only been on two minutes,” I’d say, which was usually how long it was before he picked up the extension, and he’d say “It’s been ten minutes, don’t tell me. The phone company charges by the minute, you know, and not a single flat fee for the call. Besides, I’m expecting some very important calls from my patients, so say goodbye.”

“Close the icebox door,” he’d say when he saw me looking inside the refrigerator for something to eat, “or get what you want fast. You’re spoiling all the food.”

“You already eat like three Greeks,” he’d say sometimes when I’d open the refrigerator or breadbox shortly after dinner, “you want to make it four?” “I’m a growing boy,” I said once, “you’ve said so yourself,” and he said “Yeah, don’t I know, but give it a little rest, will ya? You’re eating us out of house and home.”

That woman’s got a beak and bad breath on her that’s driving away fine prospects,” yet he made a match for her as he did for lots of his patients. “I hate to see two people lonely,” he said, “so when they sit in my chair and tell me they’re looking for somebody, I almost immediately know which of my other patients is the right one.” If the couple got married — several couples did — he hinted to them that he expected as a thank-you for bringing them together a new suit from Harry Rothman’s or four custom-made shirts from the Custom Shirt Shop.

“When I was a boy I walked to work even on the worst days to save on trolley fare. Thunderstorms I’d go through — blizzards like we don’t get anymore — and I never got even a cold or where the weather stopped me from a single day’s work.”

I kissed his lips on his hospital deathbed, something I’d never done with him — it had always been the cheek — and didn’t want to do it then but for some reason thought I should. I was alone in the room with him when he died.

I knew he was dead; everything about his body said so and I’d heard a death rattle and put my ear over his mouth and heart. I didn’t check his pulse because I was never good at finding it on anyone but myself. I wanted to kiss him with nobody around before I summoned the hospital staff and they examined him and declared him dead and shooed me out of the room so they could clean up him and his bed. From a pay phone down the hall I called my mother to say Dad had died peacefully and then my brothers and sisters. I had lots of change on me because he’d come into the hospital in a coma and we didn’t think his room needed a phone. Kissing him was something I think he never would have done with me if I were the one who died, and why should he? He had more sense than me in many ways — he never did anything unless he was sure he wanted to — and no fake sentimentality. I’d come every day to the hospital — it was an easy cross-town bus ride from my apartment — and stayed the last two nights there sleeping on a couch in the visitor’s lounge and every hour or so looking in on him and sitting by his bed and dabbing his forehead and cheeks with a towel if they were wet and swabbing his lips with glycerin swabs if they were dry. He probably would have done what he did with my youngest sister, who died in the same hospital of cancer when she was twenty-three, though like him the cause of death was listed as pneumonia: visited me after work the first two days, stayed half an hour and then gone home to have dinner. And after those two visits — maybe even after the first — said to my mother “I can’t go anymore”—this is what she told me at the time—“It’s too tough to. I can’t take seeing one of my kids in this condition.” So he wouldn’t have seen me alive after the first or second visit and would have left it to my mother to tell him how I was doing, I’m almost sure of it. With my brother he never had to go through any of that because Gene drowned and was never found.

“Kiss me, I’m your father, and I don’t deserve it after the nickel I just gave.”

“Listen to me, I’m your father, and you know anyone else better to advise you with your welfare in mind? I’ve been around; I know the ropes. Believe me, I won’t steer you wrong.”

“Leave the house for good, why don’t you,” he said a couple of times. “All I ever wanted was for my kids to be civil to me and for there to be a bit of peace in my life. But I can’t have any of it when you’re always kvetching and squabbling with me and making speeches and getting angry at every third thing in the world.”

I think what hurt him most, other than the deaths of my sister and brother and of course his mother, and more my brother than my sister since she’d been sick since she was five, he said, “and we never thought she’d live as long as she did,” was that while he was in prison my mother got him to go along with a name change for all the kids. “She forced it on me. Shoved the powers of attorney at me and said ‘Sign them or I won’t be there when you’re released.’ I should’ve told her to stow it, but for the sake of keeping the family together, I didn’t. She was ashamed of my last name because I was all over the newspapers in this big graft scandal and was doing time and she said all your lives would be ruined by having my last name. That people remember, but she knew damn well they forget or don’t care. As for me, I never regretted going through any of it except for losing my dental license all those years. So I had to find another profession when I got out, and it worked. I was a terrific salesman; made a bundle and would’ve stuck with it but I loved dentistry more. But I’ll never forgive her. She did the worst possible thing she could do to me, and all out of spite. That’s why I get so mad at the dinner table sometimes. I see you kids and I think of it, and it makes my blood boil.”