Joseph Heller - Closing Time

Mr. Tilyou had room to grow. Below him was a lake of ice and a desert of burning sand, some meadows of mud, a river of boiling blood, and another of boiling pitch. There were dark woods he could have if he could think what to do with them, with trees with black leaves, and some leopards, a lion, a dog with three heads, and a she-wolf, but these were never to be caged, which ruled out a zoo. But his imagination was not as supple as formerly; he had fears he might be getting old. He had triumphed with symbols, was used to illusions. His Steeplechase ride was not really a steeplechase, his park was not a park. His gifts were in collaborative pretense. His product was pleasure. His Tornado was not a tornado, his Dragon's Gorge was not a gorge. No one thought they were, and he could not imagine what he would have done with a true tornado or a genuine gorge and a real dragon. He was not positive he could hit upon sources of hilarity in a desert with burning sand, a rain of fire, or a river of boiling blood.

The recapture of his house filled him still with pride in his patient tenacity. It had taken thirty years, but where there is no time, one always has plenty.

The house was of yellow wood, with three floors and gabled attic. No one seemed to comment when, shortly after his death, the lowest floor had disappeared and the house of three stories had become a house with two. Neighborhood pedestrians did sometimes remark that the letters on the front of the lowest step appeared to be sinking, as indeed they were. By the time of the war, the name was almost half gone. During the war, young men went into military service, families moved, and Mr. Tilyou spied again his chance to act. Soon after the war, no one found curious the empty space, soon a parking lot, that was where the house had been. When shortly afterward his Steeplechase amusement park disappeared too, and then the Tilyou movie theater closed, his name was gone from the island and out of mind.

Now, in possession of everything he wanted and safe at home, he was the envy of his Morgans and Rockefellers. His engaging magic mirrors never had any deforming effect upon him or his ticket takers.

Returning to his office after work near the end of a day, although there were no days and he had no work, he found Mr. Rockefeller. He gave him another dime and chased him off. It was hard to associate the poor figure even remotely with that complex of business buildings in Rockefeller Center and with that oval pearl of an ice-skating rink. He saw from an imperious note on his rolltop desk that Mr. Morgan would be back to have it out with him once more over Mr. Tilyou's new no-smoking policy. Rather than face him again so soon, Mr. Tilyou took back his dust-free bowler from the peg on his coatrack. He fluffed up the petals of the flower in his lapel, which was always fresh and always would be. With energetic gait, he hurried from the office to his home, humming quietly the delightful Siegfried Funeral Music that resonated from his carousel.

Bounding up his stoop of three steps, he stumbled very slightly on the top one, and this had not happened to him before. On the shelf above the pair of sinks at his kitchen window, he spied something strange. The Waterford crystal vase with the white lilies looked perfectly normal, but, mysteriously, the water inside seemed to lie on an angle. In a minute he found a carpenter's level and set it down on the sill of the window. He shivered with a chilling surprise. The house was out of plumb. He strode back outside with wonder, his brow furrowing. At the stoop with the vertical face bearing his name, he had no need for the carpenter's level to tell him the steps were awry, as was his walkway. The right side was dipping. The baseline of the letters spelling TILYOU was tilting downward and the oval bottoms of the letters at the end were already out of sight. He went rigid with alarm. Without his knowledge or intent, his house was beginning to sink again. He had no idea why.

For reasons she did not know, her father had not seemed to like her as a child or exhibit anything closer to acceptance when she was older and married. He was friendlier to her sister and brother, but not by much.

She was the oldest of three children. Her mother was more of a comfort but could effect no alleviating refinements in the household atmosphere dominated by the restrained and aloof male parent. They were Lutherans in Wisconsin, not far from the state capital in Madison, where, in winter, the days are short, the nights black and long, and the biting winds frigid. "It was just the way he always was," explained her mother, defending him. "We knew each other from church and school." They were the same age and both were virgins when they married. "Our families picked us out for each other. That's the way we did things then. I don't think he has ever been really happy."

He ran a small retail agricultural supply business he had inherited and enlarged, and he bantered more freely with his employees and suppliers, who were fond of him, than he was likely to do at home. He was commonly more at ease with others. It was nothing against her personally, her mother kept insisting, for as a child she had always been good. But at her father's death, from lung cancer too, they found out he had made no provision for her in his will, although he bequeathed to her three children portions that in total equaled that left her brother and her sister, and he awarded her discretionary power as trustee. She was not altogether surprised.

"What else would I expect?" Glenda said, when she spoke of it. "Don't think it still doesn't hurt."

As a youth, the Lutheran father, who had no taste for music and no feel for dancing or any other kind of the festive foolery the mother savored-she made masks for Halloween and loved costume parties-had revealed a native talent for drawing and an excited curiosity in the structures of buildings and elaborate architecture. But these latent aptitudes were ignored in the severe circumstances of a rural environment regulated by a father sterner than he turned out to be, with parents leading lives of restriction more spare than his own. No thought was given to college or art studies, and the suppression of these propensities could have been crucial in the forging of his dour personality and the inexpressible anguish in which his character was rooted. Only later could she define him that way and pity him sporadically. A frugal man of cautious extravagances, he nevertheless made known early his aspiration to provide a higher education for each of ihe children and the sentiment that he would be pleased if they availed themselves of the opportunity. Glenda alone made use of this singular generosity; and he did not ever let abate his disappointment with the others, as though rebuffed and mortified intentionally. He was pleased with her performance in her primary schools but gave voice to his praise critically, in a vein of reproach that provided little ground for rejoicing. If she brought home a test paper of ninety in algebra or geometry, perhaps the sole person with a grade so high, he wished to know, after a reluctant compliment, why she had missed the one problem in ten she had failed to solve. An A – would evoke questions about the minus, an A would impel him to sulk about the absence of the plus. There was no drollery in his seriousness; there was a wry kind in her retelling.

It is a miracle of sorts that she grew up to be lighthearted, with little self-doubt, and was competent and decisive, which was much what I needed.

In her secondary school, with some support from her mother and much encouragement from her younger sister, she succeeded in winning a place on the cheerleading squad. However, still somewhat shy and not then by nature gregarious, she was never inducted wholeheartedly into the buoyant social lift the other girls enjoyed among themselves and with the school athletes and their gross acolytes. There were many parties and social rallies she did not attend. She was shorter by an inch or two than most her age, with dimples, brown eyes, and honey-colored hair; thin when young but with a noticeable bosom. She did not dale much, mainly because she was not always comfortable when she did, and in this too lay the occasion for mixed signals from her father. He was vexed when she went out unchaperoned, as though she were guilty of indecency merely by going; and on the other hand, he spoke in self-referential humiliation, as though himself shunned, when she was home evenings on weekends. He prophesied in dire admonition of the lifelong, bleak pitfalls inherent in becoming a "wallflower" early, as he was inclined to feel he himself had been, and of the misuse he had made of his chances when young. Wallflower was a word he spoke often. Personality was another; it was his grim conclusion that a person always ought to have more. Neither she, her brother, nor her sister could recall ever being held by him in a hug.