Craig Lancaster - 600 Hours of Edward

Tonight’s episode, the ninth of the first season of the color episodes, is called “The Fur Burglary.” It originally aired on March 16, 1967, and it is one of my favorites.

In it, a furrier by the name of Emile Hartman (played by Henry Corden, who appeared in two episodes of Dragnet and nearly every popular TV show of the ’60s and ’70s) has been wiped out by burglars. Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon are called in to investigate, and they soon determine that they will have to pose as buyers in hopes that the burglars will attempt to sell the furs. Emile Hartman teaches Officer Bill Gannon how to be a connoisseur of fine fur, giving him a vocabulary that includes such terms as “gamey” and “split skins.”

Eventually, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon arrest the men responsible and get the furs back to Emile Hartman, saving his business.

I suppose when something is taken from you, it can be a lucky break to have men like Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon to get it back.

There are not enough men like those two to go around.

As you may have guessed, I already have a green office folder for the man who does my father’s bidding, Jay L. Lamb. I should write to my father, but I just don’t know what I could say to a man I suddenly do not know.

Mr. Lamb:

I must again voice my objections to your interference in affairs that should be handled within my family. I realize that you serve at my father’s whims, but I am left to wonder if $350 an hour is really worth intruding where you do not belong and are not welcome. For me, the answer is clearly no, and after the events of today, I would think that any reasonable person would come to the same conclusion. You will have to make peace with that question yourself.

At any rate, I very much resent your attempts to provide me with legal counsel. Should I require the assistance of an attorney, you can be sure that I will choose someone who is not a toady for a frustrated, spiteful, violent man.

In other words, I will not choose you.

While I would like to be able to say that this letter concludes our interaction, I know that this is not up to me, but rather to my father. I am hopeful that we will not have any more such episodes, but hope is not a reliable emotion. I shall wait for the facts to emerge.

In the meantime, I bid you good day, until I can bid you good riddance.

My waking hours on the 303rd day of the year (because it is a leap year) begin with a 7:14 a.m. phone call.

“Hello?”

“Edward?” It is my mother. My mother never calls me at this hour.

“Mother?”

“Edward,” she says, and I can hear a wobble in her voice, “you need to come to St. V’s. Something has happened to your father.”

“What?”

“Just come, Edward. St. V’s emergency room.” She hangs up.

My data will have to wait.

St. V’s is what people in Billings call St. Vincent Healthcare. There are two main hospitals in Billings, St. V’s and Billings Clinic. They sit side by side in the hospital district downtown. Billings, because it is the largest city in a 500-mile radius, is where many of the people in Montana and northern Wyoming come for hospital services. If you have an extremely serious medical condition, you might have to go to Denver or Salt Lake City or Seattle, but the Billings hospitals can handle most anything else. My father is at St. V’s, so maybe he doesn’t have an extremely serious medical condition. He is also in the emergency room, so maybe he does. I try not to think of this on the drive over, because it’s just conjecture. I prefer facts.

I’ve moved quickly. After my mother hung up the phone, I pulled on a pair of blue jeans. I can wear my 1999 R.E.M. Up tour T-shirt to the hospital. At 7:29, I pull into the St. V’s parking lot and cross the street to the emergency department. I am not wearing a coat. It’s cold.

My mother is sitting in the waiting room. So is Jay L. Lamb. I hadn’t imagined that I would see him again so soon.

“Edward, come sit down,” my mother says when she sees me. She is calm in a way that I find eerie, but I can see that she has been crying. Her makeup is splotchy from her tears.

I sit next to my mother.

Jay L. Lamb nods to acknowledge me, but I do not return it.

“Edward, your father collapsed this morning,” my mother says.

“I don’t understand.”

“He was going to hit golf balls and he collapsed.”

“He was playing golf? In these temperatures?”

“Edward, that’s not important. He collapsed. Someone saw him. They got help to him. He’s…” My mother is crying again.

“He’s inside,” Jay L. Lamb says. “They’re doing what they can.”

He wraps an arm around my mother’s shoulders, and she leans into his chest, sobbing.

I clasp my hands in front of me, lean forward, and stare at the floor. And I wait.

It is not a long wait in terms of time, but it seems endless. It occurs to me again that time can be an illusion, even though it is also a fact. My mother continues to sob, and Jay L. Lamb continues to comfort her. “He has a good team in there,” he says. She cries some more. I keep my eyes on the floor.

At 7:58, the emergency room doctor, a young-looking man with a mop of swept-back black hair and round wire-rim glasses, emerges with a grim look on his face. Beside me, my mother starts quaking.

“Mrs. Stanton, gentlemen,” he says to us. “I am so sorry. We did everything we could, but we just could not revive him.”

My mother wails. Jay L. Lamb clutches her tightly.

“He appears to have suffered a massive heart attack. The lab work will tell us for sure. I am so sorry.”

“He’s dead?” The voice is mine, and yet it seems to be coming from outside me.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

My mother wails again, sobbing, “No, no, no, no.”

The young doctor reaches out and clasps her hand.

My mother sniffles and gurgles and turns her head from Jay L. Lamb’s chest to face the doctor. “I want to see him.”

My father’s body is in an empty room in the emergency department. Although I recognize him, it’s not really him. Gone is the brightness and color in his face and the way his expressiveness added to it. He is pale. His chest, stripped free of his ever-present golf shirt, shows the trauma of the attempts to save him—the compression from CPR, the use of the defibrillator paddles. His ordinarily well-kept graying hair is mussed and tangled and wet. In life, my father could be found where there was chatter and aroma and motion. Here, it smells of cleaning fluid, we’re standing still, and no one is saying a word.

He is gone.

My mother, sturdier now than she was just minutes ago, steps to the edge of the gurney and strokes my father’s face, then bends down and kisses his cheek.

“Jay,” she says softly, “will you take care of everything?”

“I will. Shall I give you a ride home?”

“No,” I say. “I will take her home.”

My mother is mostly silent on the climb up the Rimrocks along Twenty-Seventh Street. As we hit the straightaway atop the rock, heading toward my parents’—my mother’s—house, she says, “I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t, either.”

“Edward, your father is gone.”

“I know.”

She looks out the window at the farmland speeding by. Up here, yesterday’s snow still lies sprinkled on the ground.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.

The house, which always seemed to me to be ridiculously large for just two people, seems cavernous without my father in it. I had my troubles with him—never more so than the last time I saw him, an occasion that now fills me with regret—but I loved his outsized personality and the way he could fill a room with his laugh and his voice.