J. Lennon - The Funnies

We pulled her gently up. “You’re okay?”

“Had a little spell there,” she said. This is what she used to say when she got drunk and fell down from that. She was lighter now, it seemed by half. I looked up at Pierce, who was staring at her like she had just been dropped into the law office hallway from outer space. Mike Maas kept flinching toward us, as if to help.

“Why don’t you go in, Mike,” said Bitty.

“Oh, yeah.” He turned and headed for the smoked-glass doors at the end of the hallway. We followed, with Pierce bringing up the rear. Mike held the doors open for us this time.

* * *

Rose and Bobby and Nancy were already there, along with Susan Caletti the editor, and a tall, pot-bellied man with jet-black hair. They all sat behind the burnished mahogany table that filled the room, my brother’s family and Rose around the tall man, Susan a few seats away.

Rose blanched. “Jesus! Where’s her walker?”

“I didn’t see it,” I said. My mother was scanning the room, scowling.

“I put it behind the desk,” Rose said, exhaling loudly. She clomped past us into the hall and came back wielding the walker like a lion tamer with a wooden stool. She swept around us and placed it before Mom. “Here you go, Mom,” she said.

“Oh, yes.”

“So,” Rose said. She put her hands on her hips. “Is this everybody?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t cousins supposed to crawl out of the woodwork to claim their slice of the pie?”

“What cousins?” Rose sounded angry, like the cousins were waiting in the lobby with six-shooters and burlap sacks with dollar signs printed on them. I looked past her to the tall man. Bobby was seated across from him, asking quiet questions.

“Who’s that guy?” I asked quietly.

“Ha, ha,” said Rose.

“No, really,” I said. “Do I know him?”

Bitty released Mom, who had taken hold of the walker. “You don’t remember Uncle Mal?” she said.

At this, Uncle Mal met me with a grim smile. “Hello, Tim, Pierce,” he said. “Hello, Bee.”

Bee was Uncle Mal’s name for Bitty. She loved it. When he came to the house, he used to bring her bee things: little plastic bees, stickers with bees on them, and once, a spiral notebook with a giant cartoon bee on the cover, pollinating a wide pink flower. For months she spent her weekend afternoons sitting at the kitchen table, writing stories in it about her and Uncle Mal. She let me read one once. It was about a killer robot that threatened them with violence; Uncle Mal talked the robot out of it, and the three of them went and had a picnic. It was a strange story, full of peculiar details. A crush of Bitty’s from the TV at the time had a fluffy, feathered haircut, and in the story Uncle Mal did too. It was an expressive head of hair, tossing and tousling in the air as the story ebbed and flowed.

But now it was exceedingly thin, and dyed a deep, implausible black. He wore it clumped and spiky, like a wet Marine. And though he still had the same sunken chest, into which his necktie dipped like an old clothesline, Mal had developed a shocking paunch. It stuck out over his belt as if tied there with rope. He looked like a former basketball star who now managed apartment buildings for a living. I must have gaped.

“I look a little different,” he said.

“Well, it’s been a while.”

Bitty left Mom’s side and tiptoed around the table to him, planting a kiss in the oily fuzz over his ear. “It’s good to see you,” she said.

“Always good to see you, Bee. I’m so sorry about your dad.” He looked up at me. “You too, Tim.”

“None of this seems real,” I said, and meant it.

He nodded solemnly. “How are you doing, Pierce?”

Pierce shrugged. “You know.”

“Mmm-hmm. Why don’t you all have a seat?”

Mal watched me as I helped Mom into a chair and walked around behind her to my own. I nodded to Susan as I sat down, and she nodded back. What was she doing here? Did she expect some inheritance from my father? Had they been close? Her face was such a rictus of discomfort that I could read nothing else into it, and her hands squirmed against each other in full view, leaving a damp shadow on the shiny tabletop.

Mal had a thick manila envelope in front of him, his giant hands spread flat on either side. “Well,” he said. “We might as well get this under way.” He turned the envelope ninety degrees on the table, reached into it and pulled out three things: a few pieces of textured, watermarked white paper, a thin white business-size envelope, and another envelope, identical save for a slight bulge in the middle. Both of these envelopes were signed across the flap — I recognized the crabbed version of my father’s careful hand — and stamped and signed on the front.

“It’s a very simple will,” Mal said. Bobby’s eyes widened. “The six of you, Rosalinde, Robert, Timothy, Pierce, Beatrice and Dorothy, are the only heirs.”

I glanced over at Susan to see what her reaction was to this, but she was sitting perfectly still, her hands folded, watching Mal. He began to read the preliminaries: sound mind and body, and so on. The only other sound in the room was the air conditioner’s arctic hiss, and muffled traffic noise from outside.

“To Dorothy, my wife, and my children Rosalinde, Robert and Beatrice, I leave my extant liquid assets. These are to be divided equally into funds which I have already established in their names. In addition, I have established for my wife, Dorothy, in her name, a fund for the maintenance of her care until her death, such fund as will be attended to by the executor of this will.” He looked up, smiling sadly at my mother, whose eyes were elsewhere.

“To Pierce Mix, I leave the contents of the bank account already established jointly in our names, the house at 12 Old Dock Road, Riverbank, New Jersey, the attached garage, the 1984 Cadillac El Dorado, and the land surrounding the house and garage, save that land on which my cartoon studio stands. To Pierce I also leave this envelope, its contents, and all rights and claims attached to its contents.”

Mal held up the bulging envelope and set it down again.

“Save those items already mentioned, I leave my worldly possessions to my wife and all my children, to be divided as they see fit.”

He paused a moment here. Had I not heard right, or had my name not been mentioned along with the liquid assets? Could it be that I would get no money at all? The thought crowded my head like a mouthful of stale bread. Nothing! I was getting nothing!

“To my son Timothy,” Mal read, perhaps more slowly now. “I leave the Family Funnies comic strip, all merchandising, reprint, animation, book publishing, advertising and other rights as set forth in my name by Burn Features Syndicate, Incorporated, and the cartoon studio behind 12 Old Dock Road, Riverbank, New Jersey, the land it stands on and its full contents (and all rights to all drawings therein) under the following conditions: that he is able, three months from this date, to produce a week’s worth of daily Family Funnies strips of his own devising and execution, to the satisfaction of a board of Burn Features editors and directors set forth below.” Mal proceeded to read from a list of names, none of which I heard. A silence gathered in the room with guerrilla stealth. People were looking at me.

“I don’t get it,” I said, my voice dying in the chill air.

“He left you the comic strip,” Mal said. “To draw.”

“That’s all?”

“This too,” he said, and pushed the second envelope toward me. It had the approximate heft of three or four pieces of paper.

I turned the envelope over in my hands. TIM, it read, in faint ballpoint ink. When I looked up I met Susan’s eyes. She was gazing at me expectantly, like a lover naked under a thin sheet.