Joseph Heller - Closing Time

I took the message, and she never saw that happening again, as far as I know.

And in the hospital at Fort Dix, she faced me down over Herman the German. I knew then she was right for me, after I cooled off and stopped simmering.

"Who takes care of you here?" she wanted to know, on one of her weekend visits from the city. "What do you do when you need something? Who comes?"

I'd be enchanted to demonstrate, I assured her. And then I bellowed, "Herman!" I heard the frightened footsteps of the orderly before I could roar out a second time, and then Herman my German was standing there, slight, timid, panting, nervous, in his fifties, no Aryan superman hero he, no Übermensch, not that one.

"Mein Herr Rabinowitz?" he began immediately, as I'd taught him I wanted him to. "Wie kann ich Ihnen dienen?"

"Achtung, Herman," I ordered casually. And after he clicked his heels and snapped to attention, I gave the order he understood. "Anfangen!" He began to tell me about himself. And I turned to Claire. "So, honey, how was the trip down? And where are you staying? Same hotel?"

Her eyes boggled as the man recited, and she couldn't believe it when she caught on. And she didn't look pleased. I almost had to laugh at her comical expression. Herman reported his name, rank, and serial number, and then his date and place of birth, education, work experience, family background and situation, and everything else I'd told him I wanted from him each time I stood him at attention and asked him to begin telling me about himself again. And I continued chatting with Claire as though I didn't see him and certainly didn't care.

"So I'll tell you what I've been thinking. I'm not going to reenlist so forget about that one. The old man might need me back in the junkshop for a while."

Claire couldn't figure out which of us to pay attention to. I kept a straight face. The room went quiet. Herman had finished and stood there blinking and sweating.

"Oh, yes," I said, without turning, as though I had just remembered him. "Noch einmal."

And he began again. "Mein Name ist Hermann Vogeler. Ich bin ein Soldat der deutschen Armee. Ich bin Backer. Ich wurde am driUen September 1892 geboren und ich bin dreiundfünfzig Jahre alt."

"Lew, stop-it's enough already," Claire broke in finally, and she was angry. "Stop! Stop it!"

I didn't like her talking to me that way, in front of Herman or anyone else. That vein in my neck and jaw started ticking. "So I think I'll begin with the old man again," I said right past her. "Just to have some kind of income while I try to decide what we want to do with ourselves."

"Lew, let him go," she ordered. "I mean it!"

"My father raised cows and sold milk," Herman was reciting in German. "I went to school. After school I applied for college, but I was not accepted. I was not smart."

"It's okay," I told her innocently, while Herman went on as obediently as the first time. "It's what he's trained to do. They trained him to bake. I trained him to do this. When he's finished I'll have him do it a few more times, so that none of us will ever forget. We can live with the folks for a while in the top-floor apartment. We're the youngest, so they'll make us climb stairs. I' don't think I want to take time to go to college, not if we're, married. You want to be married?"

"Lew, I want you to let him go! That's what I want! I warn you."

"Make me."

"I will. Don't push me."

"How?"

"I'll take my clothes off," she decided, and I could see she meant it. "Right here. I'll undress. It's enough! I'll take everything off and get on the bed on top of you, right now, if you don't let him stop. I'll sit on top of you, even with your stitches, even if they open. I'll let him see everything you've seen, I'll show it to him, I swear I will. Send him away."

She knew how I felt, that slick one. When bikini bathing suits came in, I didn't have to tell her not to wear one, and I finally gave up trying to talk to my daughters about them and just did not want to go to the beach when they were there.

She began unbuttoning. She kept unbuttoning, and she unbuttoned some more. And when I saw the white slip with the low neck and lace and the swell underneath of those really big tits that I never wanted any other man in the world ever even to take notice of, I had to back down. I could picture her unzipping and stepping out of her skirt with him still in the room, and then raising her slip, and I was afraid of that and just couldn't stand the thought, and I had to stop Herman, and I did it as though I were angry with him instead of her, like it was all his fault, not hers, or mine, and I had to send him away.

"Okay, enough, button up." I was in a rage with her too. "Okay, Herman. Genug. Fertig. Danke schon. Go out now! Schnell! Mach schnell! Get the hell out."

"Danke schon, Herr Rabinowitz. Danke vielmals." He was quivering, which embarrassed me, and backed out bowing.

"That wasn't funny, Lew, not to me," she was letting me know as she buttoned up.

"I wasn't doing it to be funny." I felt nasty too.

"Then why?"

I didn't know why.

By the time he left, I actually had a soft spot for the poor old guy, and I went out of my way to wish him luck before they shipped him off for what they called repatriation.

By then I felt pity for him. He was weak. Even by other Germans he would be considered weak, and at his age he would never be strong. He'd reminded me already in certain ways of Sammy's father, a sweet old quiet man with silver hair who all summer went off for a long dip in the ocean as soon as he came home from work. Sammy or his brother or sister would be sent out by Sammy's mother to keep an eye on him and remind him to come home in time for supper. Sammy and I were both lucky. We each had an older sister to take care of the parents at the end. Sammy's father read all the Jewish newspapers, and in his house they all liked to listen to classical music on the radio. At the Coney Island library, Sammy would put in reservations for books for him that had been translated into Yiddish, novels mostly, and mostly by Russians. He was friendly. My father was not. My folks hardly read at all. I never could find the time. At the beginning when Sammy tried writing short stories and funny articles to sell to magazines, he tried them out on me. I never knew what to say, and I'm glad he stopped using me.

Sammy had that old picture of his father in uniform from the First World War. He was a funny-looking young guy, like all those soldiers then, in a helmet that looked too big for his small head, and with a gas mask and a canteen on his belt. Old Jacob Singer had come to this country to get away from the armies over there, and here he was back in one. His eyes were kind and smiling and they looked into yours. Sammy doesn't always meet your eye. When we were younger and started with the kissing games, we had to tell him to look right at the girl he was holding and hugging, instead of off to the side. Sammy at sixty-eight is already older than his father was when he died. I already know I'm not going to live as long as mine did.

Sammy and I lived on different blocks and our parents never met. Except for relatives who lived somewhere else and came on summer weekends for a day at the beach, none of us ever invited other families in for dinner or lunch.

My old man was not especially friendly to anyone outside the family, and friends like Sammy and Winkler were not all that comfortable when they came to my house and he was home. I was the favorite he had in mind to run the business when he grew too old and see to it that there was always a livelihood for him and for all of the brothers and sisters and their children who needed it and couldn't find anything else. The Rabinowitzes were close. Always I was the best outside man there too, the talker, the schmeichler, the salesman, the schmoozer, the easygoing guy who would go to one old building after another to butter up some poor wretch of a janitor who was shoveling coal into a cellar furnace or rolling out garbage cans and ask him politely if he was the "superintendent" or the "manager." I wanted to talk to the "gentleman" who was in charge and would hint at all the ways we could help each other. I would leave him a business card Winkler had made up for me cheap through a printer he knew, and try to establish a contact with him that could lead to our getting the old pipes and the old plumbing fixtures like sinks and toilet bowls and bathtubs and the broken steam and hot-water boilers in the house, sometimes even before they were broken. We knew people who could fix anything. If it couldn't be fixed, we could sell it for junk. There would always be junk, my father would promise us like an optimist, while Claire and I would try not to smile, and always someone to pay you to take it and pay you to sell it. He made sure to talk to both of us when he talked about money after I was back. Now that I was not a child, he would raise me to sixty dollars a week, almost double. And to sixty-five a week after we were married. And of course we could have the top-floor apartment unti we could afford something of our own.