Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“After we were married Kranz put me through my student year at Morristown General and I made him the beneficiary of my $10,000 G.I. life insurance. He died just before the close of the war. I was with him at the time, on a stateside furlough. He had a hunch his time was up and, not wanting to die in bed, asked me to dress him. I got him into his clothes and tied his tie. When I finished knotting it he just looked down at it kind of thoughtfully for a moment and said, ‘You know, Miriam, styles come and styles go. Wide ties like this one aren’t going to be considered very fashionable in a while, but then, in about twenty-five years, they’re going to be more popular than ever.’ Marshall, these were the last words he ever spoke.”

Miriam related all this in her lazy style. Listening to her, Dick had a sense of the piecemeal forces of erosion. He never interrupted; even when she slipped and called him Marshall he let it pass. He was tilted back deep in his chair, his feet on the desk next to the microphone.

“I take only private cases now,” Miriam was saying. “The money’s better, for one thing — though I don’t need money, really. There’s my army pension, and Kranz, who had this terrific business sense, told me back in Morristown that the big thing in the fifties and sixties was going to be office equipment — copiers, things like that. I made some good investments and I’ve got a pretty fair-sized nest egg now.”

Yes, Dick thought, nest. He remembered their nest. He undid the buttons of his shirt and scratched his belly.

“I take cases mostly because it lets me travel — I’m with an agency that sends nurses all over the country. I meet a lot of interesting people. The sick are wonderful folks, Marshall. If you recall I once told you I have to help people. Thank God that’s never burned out in me. Well, they’re just so gentle. Sedation does that, of course, helplessness does. It hurts them to move and you have to do everything for them. And if they’re old they’re that much weaker anyway. Why, some of my patients I just take and tote them around as if they were babies. I was always strong, you’ll remember, and I’m a big old gal now. You probably wouldn’t recognize me.”

He had an erection. The pressure of his clothing was irritating, so he unzipped his fly and his penis sprung out of his pants. His director rapped on the glass of the control booth with a key. Marshall Maine glanced at him and waved lazily.

“Course, maybe I wouldn’t recognize you either,” she said. “Oh Lord, I was with so many young men in the army. You know, you get tired of young people after a time. Of course if they’re really sick they’re just as good as anybody else, but most of the time they don’t want to take their pills, and they never get over being embarrassed. You just can’t do for them like you can somebody who’s had some experience and seen the world and knows its ways. My patient here in Ohio, now; he’s a man about our age, Marshall, a widower with a bad phlebitis. A very interesting man. ‘Mrs. Kranz,’ he’ll say, ‘with my leg the way it is I just can’t handle myself on the bedpan. Would you mind very much if I just let go? You don’t have to do the sheets — heck, just throw them away and buy some more over the telephone through the Home Shopper.’ He’s very generous. I just can’t say enough about it. Naturally I have to clean him up afterward; you can’t let a person lie in his own dirt. Now you couldn’t do that with a young man; a young man would just as soon be constipated forever before he’d let you touch him.

”I want my patients to want my hands on their bodies,” Miriam said. “How else can I help them? Men in their fifties — I suppose you’re up there now yourself — whose stomachs have gone soft, who don’t try to hide their bald spots with fancy hair styles, and if they don’t shave for a couple of days, what of it? Who aren’t always squeezed up tight to keep their gas in, and are smooth on their chests as babies — those are your interesting men.”

He could not picture her as she had been. He remembered her voice, but couldn’t recall her face or the shape of her body. He didn’t know if she had been tall or heavy or anything about her. Nevertheless, though he had not seen her in thirty years, he had what he was sure was an exact impression of what she had become. He saw her dowager’s hump, the features of her face, the nose rounded and gently comical, the crow’s feet and wide mouth, the precise color of her hair, the immense rounds of breast, full as roasts, the wide lap beneath her nurse’s white uniform with its bas-relief of girdle and garter like landmarks under a light snow. He had removed his shirt and slipped out of his pants and underwear, and was almost as naked as he had been in Morristown when she had bathed him in bed, or as she herself had been when she padded about their small room doing her little chores and telling him stories of her life in Iowa. He closed his eyes for just a moment, content, irritated only by the distortion of her voice on the telephone.

“Well,” Miriam said, “it’s awfully late. I have to give my little man his pill. Maybe before I leave Ohio I’ll call again. I’m proud you made such a success, Marshall.”

He thanked her comfortably. He had pulled off one stocking and was rolling the other down his leg. “Ohio?”

“Yes. I told you that.”

“Cincinnati?” Behr-Bleibtreau, if that’s who the anthropologist had been, had made a pointed reference to the caller from Cincinnati.

“That’s right, Marshall. How’d you know that?”

“Your patient — what’s your patient’s name?”

“Well, that’s a matter of professional ethics, Marshall.”

“Does he know you listen to this program?”

“Why, yes, of course he does. He’s the one who told me about it. We’re listening to it together right now.”

“Listen,” he said, “his name’s Behr-Bleibtreau, isn’t it?”

“Marshall, I can’t tell you a patient’s name when I’m on a case, and that’s final.”

“It is Behr-Bleibtreau, isn’t it?”

“Final is final. You don’t know me when I make up my mind. I can be pretty darn stubborn. Goodnight now, Marshall.”

He looked down and saw that he was undressed. One knee-length sock, bunched over his heel, was all he was wearing.

“Listen—” he said.

“Goodnight now.” She hung up. Dick Gibson angrily pulled the sock the rest of the way off his foot.

“Your feet stink.”

He was talking to an old fellow. The man had been driving along the rough back road between Aliosto, Georgia, and Clendennon, Alabama, on his way to visit his son-in-law who was foreman of the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Anniston, when he spied a tree, uprooted and lying across some power lines near the side of the road. The tree was not a large one, but its weight was great enough to bow the lines, pressing them down to about the level of a man’s shoulders.

Before the old man retired he had worked for many years as a drill-press operator in a factory which manufactured and assembled playground equipment. He said that this is what had given him his great love for children. During his last five or six years with the company he had been appointed by his union to be the shop safety officer, and it was his responsibility to be on the lookout for potentially hazardous situations and to figure out means by which accidents could be cut to a minimum. Not only had he supervised the posting of several dozen instructive signs throughout the plant, but he had developed what he called a “check list,” a series of precautionary steps which a worker took before ever turning on his machine.

When the old man saw the tree lying in its treacherous sling, he said his first thought was that here was a terrific potential for an accident if he ever saw one. If the lines snapped, live wires would go jumping and bucking all over the place. The lines were close enough to the side of the road to hook a passing car. Even more urgent was the fact that some kid might be lashed by the energies in the broken cables. “There’d been a terrific wind up in Aliosto the night before last,” the old man said, “and I figured maybe some tornado had touched down in the woods and just picked up that old tree and set it down on them lines.