Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“But this isn’t what concerns me. I mean to speak of the shirt, the shirt itself, of the useless sleeving of the armless, the redundancy in their cloth. Why not sewn short sleeves in which Harold might pocket his stumps? Why does a paralyzed man in a wheelchair wear shoes? What use have so many blind men for glasses? Consider the humiliation of the paralyzed man. Consider what must be such a person’s mortification when someone not only has to put his feet into his shoes for him, fitting the dead foot into the dead shoe, but lace them as well, making a lousy parcel of his flesh. And when he is done the man in the chair looks for all the world like anyone equipped for a walk in the park. And the President himself is like that. FDR is. This is how the leader of the most powerful nation on earth begins his day. Regard the doomed, cancer-wizened man whose doctor has given him eight months to live. He wears a tie. Ah.”

Is he saying he loves me? Dick Gibson wondered.

“Decorum, decorum’s the lesson even when decorum flies in the teeth of reason. Decorum preserves us from the fate of fools even while making us foolish. Would you like to see a section of the paper I bought?”

He isn’t, Dick Gibson thought. He’s saying something else, but I don’t know what.

On other occasions his father might deliver himself of a political speech which Dick felt had been prepared, actually written down in advance and memorized. But the word “occasion” is wrong. These were not occasions; indeed, a few times when something might actually be expected from his father nothing was forthcoming.

He and his father went to the movies together. It was a love story, and during one of the romantic scenes a man who was sitting in the same row with them suddenly leaped up from his seat and stumbled past Dick and his father and down the aisle toward the stage.

“Look, Dick,” his father whispered dreamily, “I hadn’t noticed it before but the first seat across the aisle from us has one of those concealed lights at just about calf-level. What are those for anyway? They seem to be staggered in alternate rows on either side of the aisle. Do you suppose they’re meant to give a shape somehow to the theater?”

Meanwhile the man had scrambled up onto the stage, where a portion of the film was to be seen projected on his white shirt. Is it Joseph from the shoe-shine stand, Dick wondered. Carole Lombard’s hand flashed in an embrace around the back of the man’s shirt; because the man stood forward of the screen, the hand seemed introduced into the movie house, a projecting presence that would draw him up into the screen, more real than the great undefiled remainder of the image, realer too than the drifting shards of image sprayed like a pale tattoo across the madman’s neck and ears and hair and dark pants, as if the pictures reached him on the other side of thick aquarium glass. The man, his head turned in angered, twisted profile toward Carole Lombard’s enormous face floating above him, was heard to scream, though what he might be saying was lost, drowned out by the soft but amplified sigh of the kiss’s aftermath and the suggestive crackle of the characters’ clothing.

His father had nothing to say.

The next day they saw a woman run over just outside their house. His father had nothing to say.

Then, for no reason, or none that Dick could see, his father, unchallenged, would seize upon an issue and explode into opinion. The man would harangue against low tariffs, then against high; now he would condemn Wall Street, now defend free enterprise; now he would blast the Jews, now Hitler, in see-saw postures of a loggerheads passion. In a way it was easier to deal with his father’s set-pieces — if only by letting the man run down, or treating what he’d said as a joke (which seemed to delight him), both of them pretending that whatever position he’d taken had been satirically meant, a rebuke — than with his silences, and easier to deal with his silences than with his moods. In these moods, frequently pantomimed, his father, normally a fastidious man, might undertake to go about in his underwear, say, scratching abstractedly at his belly hair or even plucking at his genitals. Or he might suddenly come up to his son while Dick was reading and slap him abruptly on the shoulder. “Come on,” he’d say, “I feel mealy, let’s go down in twos and threes and toss the ball around.” That they had no ball, that it was almost dark anyway, and that if they were to go through with the idea they would first have to find a drugstore that was still open where they could buy a ball, seemed to make no difference to his father. Indeed, the journey on the streetcar to the drugstore was an extension and deepening of his performance, his father nudging him in the ribs with his elbow and winking, or making two parallel, descending waves with his hands to indicate the female shape whenever a pretty girl — or even an ugly one — came on board. Or he might pointedly take a cigarette from a pack he carried for just this purpose and light it in full view of the motorman and the No Smoking signs posted about the car.

What could have been in the man’s mind? Was he insane? On the way to a nervous breakdown? Dick Gibson might have thought so had his father not taken pains to be only selectively mad — mad, that is, merely in his older son’s presence. Dick was reminded of the premise behind entertainments like the Topper stories, where the ghosts appeared only to Topper himself. In this way he was pulled into the plot, felt himself, despite his laconic stance, essential to it, a bit player magnetically drawn toward center stage. It was not unflattering that here, perhaps, was a clue to his father’s intent.

So he came to associate his father’s actions with his recent experience with Miriam, his vain attempt to unlock the secret of her voice. (He’d lied when he’d told her he’d found the secret, though the fact was he’d come to believe it.) That is, he saw them as in some way related to his testing, more grist for his ongoing apprenticeship.

How weary he was of that apprenticeship! How ready to round it off where it stood, declare it finished! He read the trade magazines— Broadcasting, Variety, Tide —and saw with an ever more painful anxiety that men as young as himself, a few of them young men he’d worked with, were getting on in their careers. A two-line notice in the “Tradewinds” column of Broadcasting about someone he’d worked with in Kansas— “Harlan Baker, formerly with WMNY, Mineola, New York, has accepted a job as junior staff announcer with WEAF, New York City”—was enough to plunge him into the profoundest depression. Baker was a hack with no style and only the most ordinary experience, and here he, who had worked in almost every facet of radio, was jobless and with no leads. Recently he had even begun to bone up on the technical aspect of radio, reading with difficulty the most scientific disquisitions on the subject, studying the diagrams (and in Morristown getting one of the X-ray technicians to explain what he couldn’t understand). There were forty million sets in the country, five thousand announcers on more than four hundred and fifty stations, and the FCC was granting more licenses daily. Soon there wouldn’t be a town of more than two thousand people that didn’t have its own radio station. Though he wanted radio to flourish, he grew jealous as a lover of its success, and uncomfortable the way a lover sometimes inexplicably is in the presence of his beloved.

In the light of his feeling that perhaps his father somehow meant his performances to be a contribution to his apprenticeship, he introduced the subject himself.

“I haven’t spoken much of my work in radio.”

“No,” his father said.