Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

Dick Gibson took her off the air. The six-second tape delay was enough to excise the passage.

[“I don’t use that name any more,”] he said into the phone while they were still off the air. [“Please don’t refer to it.”]

“That’s right,” he said easily when they were back on the air again. “Who might this be?”

“Well, I was Desebour then. Miriam?” He didn’t recognize the name. “I was working at the time in Morristown, New Jersey. A nurse? That’s why I laughed when you asked if I was a detective when I said I was on a case. Do you remember now? I don’t blame you if you forgot, me springing it on you like this. Why, it was only a few nights ago I was able to place you.”

Then he remembered the time they had lived together in the nursing home. “Well, of course,” he said. “How are you … Miriam, is it?”

“Miriam Kranz. You knew me as Desebour.”

“You’re originally from Iowa.”

“That’s right. Say, you’ve got a good memory. I’m glad to see you haven’t forgotten me.”

“No, of course not.”

“Old friends are the best friends.” Her voice had losts its reluctant edge, and she had become genuinely jolly.

“Kranz, eh?” He was surprised to find that he was slightly jealous.

“I’m a widow. You know, now that I think of it, you knew Kranz.”

“I did?”

“I’m sure he was around during your time. Let’s see [this would have been ’38, ’39. I left Morristown in ’40. You and I knew each other when I first got there. Kranz was there that whole time. He was one of my patients, a little fella. He had to be fed.”

“The one who got a hard-on when you gave him his dinner? Him?”

“Marshall! That’s terrible! We’re on the radio.”

“No, we’re on a tape delay. I’ve taken this part off. Don’t call me Marshall. Is that the one?”

Miriam giggled. “It is,” she said. “I married him right there in the nursing home.] He was a very nice man, you know.”

Now Dick remembered Miriam’s strange effect on him, how her voice telling a story, going at its own pace, random as landscape, had worked its cozy hypnotic sedation on him.

[“Whatever happened to the old bastard who came when you gave him enemas?”]

“Gracious sakes, man, I’m an old woman now. Let’s not go into all that. Folks must think we’re terrible.”

[“I took that part off. What happened to him?”]

“Well, that was just prostate trouble was what that was. He had a preternatural prostate. You know — tee hee — at the end, I could get that same reaction by taking his temp or just sitting him up in his chair. He knew he was dying, and do you know what he said to me one time? ‘Noitch Miriam, I’m a family man. I have grandchildren. I always tithed my church and believed in my God. I am as convinced of Heaven as I am of Kansas, and though I know I’m dying I want to tell you that you have made me happier in these past months than I have ever been in my life.’ Those were almost his last words, and I’ll never forget them.”

“What happened to you, Miriam? It’s been years since we’ve seen each other,” Dick said fondly.

“Oh,” she said, “a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. Kranz … Are we on the air now, [Marshall?”]

“Yes. [No, not that part. Call me Dick.”]

“Kranz had many wonderful qualities. If you didn’t know him well you might not have recognized them and just have dismissed him as a dirty little beast, but when you got to know him better he was a very fine gentlemen.”

Hearing her, it came back to Dick again how her voice had once been able to pull him out of time, float him snug as someone towed by swimmers. Her voice was quiet, historical almost; there was something in its cool timbre that assumed it would never be interrupted. As he listened to her he played absently with the six-second tape delay button. “For one thing, he was terrifically acute. He had a lot of savvy about current events. He knew more than the politicians, believe me; he was one of the canniest men I’ve ever known. He saw there was going to be a world [war] long before the rest of us dreamed of such a thing. ‘We’re sitting on a powder keg, Miriam,’ he used to say. [The Axis Powers,] those fellas over in [Germany,] Bulgaria, Finland, [Italy,] Rumania, [Japan] and Hungary, are out after everything we hold near and dear, and they’re not going to be satisfied till they get it. Why, everybody’s going to get into it — [France, England,] Costa Rica, [America,] Ecuador, San Marino, Syria — everybody. Now it’s an unfortunate thing, but there’s going to be some mighty big money made during all this. It’s going to be dog eat [dog, sure as you’re a] foot [high.] It’s coming, all right. Why, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some country like Japan weren’t planning its attack right now. It’ll be a sneak attack, I’ll bet you. We won’t have any warning. They’ll probably pick some out-of-the-way place like Pearl Harbor and do it on a Sunday morning in December after Thanksgiving and before Christmas when nobody’s expecting it.’ He had a terrific acumen in the political line.”

“It certainly sounds that way.”

“You know what he told me once? He said that probably once the war started there’d be a lot of technological advancement. He said you couldn’t tell him a smart man like Einstein didn’t have a little something extra up his sleeve, like unharnessing the power of the atom or something, and that’s what would finally win the war for us. He got all this just from reading between the lines in newspapers. I never saw anything like it. I tell you, he was one of the most logical men I’ve ever met. I’m sorry you didn’t have a chance to know him better. Anyway, he kept insisting that we all ought to be prepared, that there were going to be a lot of personal opportunities for people once the war started. He figured there’d be a black market. He was too old and sick, he said, or he’d be in there with the best of them. And he would have been too. He knew there’d be shortages once it started. He told me to buy up as many pairs of silk stockings as I could, that it didn’t make any difference what size they were. And Hershey bars. He was always after me to stockpile Hershey bars. He knew that meat and gasoline were going to be at a premium too, and he had this notion about rent control. The thing to do, he said, was get the most expensive penthouse apartments you could find up along Riverside Drive in New York City. He figured that rents would be controlled in those places for years and that you could sublet them at terrific profits. Another thing was theater tickets. They’d be hard to get once war came. He said that if a terrific composer like Richard Rodgers ever teamed up with a wonderful lyricist like Oscar Hammerstein, Jr., and they did a musical together set in some Western state back before the turn of the century, that it would be a wonderful escape for people all caught up in the war effort, and that anybody who invested money in such a show would make a fortune. I didn’t pay too much attention to any of this or I’d be a rich woman today.

“But you know, one thing he did convince me of was that there was going to be a terrific demand for R.N.’s. ‘You get your degree, Miriam,’ he said. ‘You get your R.N. license and you’ll have it made once war breaks out. Finish up, then enlist in the Army Nurse Corps. Don’t wait until December 7, 1941.’

“So that’s what I did. I enrolled as a student nurse at Morristown General, and I went into the Army Nurse program as soon as I graduated. Everyone on active duty as of 2400 hours on 6 December ’41 was promoted to first lieutenant, and if they agreed, as I did, to sign up for the duration they were jumped to captain. I was a major by V-E Day, stayed in for twenty years and rose to colonel before I retired.”