Joseph Heller - Closing Time

Claire didn't care for deadbeats and chiselers either, no matter what their religion, any more than I did back in the days when we were working very hard and she would help out on the phone when the lumberyard was still small and she wasn't busy getting the kids off to school or rushing home to be there when they got back. Later on, when she had more time and we had more money, she had a piece of an art gallery up here that wasn't supposed to make money and didn't, and after that even a half share of an art school in Lucca in Italy I bought her to help give her something else to think about when there wasn't always that much good anymore to think about here. When Mehlman called back, I grabbed the phone from her. She was too polite, like we were the ones who were supposed to apologize.

"Mehlman, you are a liar," I began right in, without even knowing what he'd been saying. "Listen to me good. If you force me to prove it you will hang yourself, because you'll have nowhere left to turn and no lies left to tell, and I will make you ashamed. Mehlman, I know you are a very religious man, so I'll put the matter to you in religious terms. If I don't have the money in my hands by Thursday noon, this shabbos you will crawl to shul on your knees, and everyone in the temple will know that Rabinowitz broke your legs because he says you are a liar and a cheat."

"I didn't know if Mehlman was lying or not. But the money was mine, and I got it.

Of course, later on I had a much more lenient view of Chapter 11 when I finally had to go into bankruptcy myself, but none of the creditors were people. They were only corporations. People were proud of me and clapped me on the back.

By then I was older and had this ailment slowing me down. I had less pep and not much reason for keeping up with newcomers who were younger and hungrier and willing to work as hard as we used to want to. I would have liked to hold on to the lumberyard and the plumbing business to pass on to the children if they wanted to keep it or sell if they didn't. We both felt the cost was too high and it was not worth the risk.

By then the cat was out of the bag. My disease was an open secret in the family. The children knew but didn't know what to make of it, and three of them weren't so small anymore. For a while they must have thought I didn't know. It was a couple of days before even Claire could look me in the eye and tell me what I already knew and did not want her to find out, that I had this disease called Hodgkin's disease, and that it was serious. I didn't know how she would take it. I didn't know how I could take it, having her see me ailing and weak.

I've lasted longer than anyone thought I would. I count. I divide my life into seven-year stretches since.

"You listen to me now," I told her that first week in the hospital up here. "I don't want anyone to know."

"You think I do?"

"We'll make something up."

By the time we let the business go and stuck only to our land and building, it was out of the bag everywhere and we could finally stop pretending to everyone that I had angina pectoris, which often laid me up and made me want to vomit, or relapsing mononucleosis, which did the same, or a nuisance of a minor inflammation I thought up and decided to call tuberculosis of the small glands that left those small scars and blue burn marks on the neck and lips and chest when treated. My muscles came back fast, and so did my appetite. Between spells I kept myself overweight just in case, and I still looked large.

"Okay, Emil, no more kid stuff," I'd said to my doctor in the hospital after the tests, when I saw his laugh was false. He was swallowing a lot and clearing his throat. If I shook his hand I knew it would be limp. "Listen to me good, Emil. It wasn't green apples like I told you, because I don't eat green apples, and I don't even know what they taste like anymore. My neck is swollen and hurts. If it's not an allergy, and you won't say it was food poisoning, then it's got to be something else, doesn't it?"

"Hodgkin's disease," said Emil, and that's the last time in twenty-eight years anyone spoke of it to me by name. "It's what it's called," Emil added.

"Cancer?" It was hard for me to speak that word too. "It's what we're all afraid of."

"It's a form of that."

"I was afraid it was leukemia."

"No, it's not leukemia."

"I don't know the symptoms, but I was afraid it was that. Emil, I don't want to hear it, but I guess I have to. How much time do I have? No lies, Emil, not yet."

Emil looked more relaxed. "Maybe a lot. I don't want to guess. A lot depends on the biology of the individual."

"I don't know what that means," I told him.

"They're your cells, Lew. We can't always tell how they're going to behave. A lot depends on you. How much can you take? How strong is your resistance?"

I'd been holding him by the forearm without realizing it, and I squeezed good-naturedly until he turned a little pale. I laughed a little when I set him free. I was still very strong. "The best you'll ever meet, Emil."

"Then, Lew, you might be okay for a long, long while yet. And feel good most of the time."

"I think that's what I'm going to do," I informed him, as though making a business decision. "Now, don't tell Claire. I don't want her to know what it is."

"She knows, Lew. You're both adults. She didn't want you to know."

"Then don't tell her you told me. I want to watch how she lies."

"Lew, will you grow up? This thing is no joke."

"Don't I know it?"

Emil took off his glasses. "Lew, there's a man in New York I want you to see. His name is Teemer, Dennis Teemer. You'll go into his hospital there. He knows more about this than anybody here."

"I won't want an ambulance."

We went down by limo, in a pearl-gray stretch limousine with black windows that allowed us to see out but nobody to see in, with me stretched out in back in a space big enough to hold a coffin, maybe two.

"We sometimes use it for that," said the driver, who'd told us he was from Venice and the brother of a gondolier there. "The seats go flat and the back opens."

Claire left him a very big tip. We always tip big, but this time it was for luck.

Teemer had his office on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum and a waiting room of quiet patients. Down the block on the way uptown to his hospital was the Frank Campbell Funeral Home-a "home," they called it-and I made jokes to myself about the convenient location. Now when I hear about those big society parties they have at the museum and places like that, I get the feeling I'm upside down in a world that's turned topsy-turvy. There are big new buildings in the city that I don't even recognize. There are new multimillionaires where there used to be Rockefellers and J. P. Morgans, and I don't know where they came from or what they're doing.

After that first time in Dr. Teemer's office, I never let Claire walk inside there with me again. She would cross into the museum and I would meet her when I was finished and we'd look at pictures if she still wanted to and then go off for lunch somewhere and go home. In that waiting room there is no one ever laughing, and I am never in a mood myself to try to get anything jolly going there. Teemer himself is still a skinny little guy with a gloomy manner, and when he does cheer me up, he does it in a way that always leaves me cranky.

"You might be interested to know, Mr. Rabinowitz," he began when we met, quot; that we no longer think of it as incurable."

All at once I felt very much better. "I'll strangle Emil. He didn't tell me that."

"He doesn't always know."

"So there is a cure? Huh?"

Teemer shook his head, and my breath caught. "No, I wouldn't put it that way. We don't think of it as a cure."

Now I felt I might sock him. "I'm listening good, Dr. Teemer. The disease is now curable, but you don't have a cure?"