“Could you sign a death certificate?”
“Frankly, I don’t know,” said Munsing. “I burnt my AMA card at that last convention. Symbolically, that is: what I actually touched a match to was a Charge-a-Plate for Eisenstein’s department store. It was celluloid and stunk. But it got me on TV, if you remember.”
“You don’t mean, after I’ve gone through all this, that you’re useless to me?” Reinhart asked in disgust.
“I put you onto Wilhelm,” said Munsing self-righteously. “If you are a cop you can go and bust him. I can also put the finger on Chuck Makelovenotwar.” Pronounced as a last name, it sounded rather Hawaiian. “You can call off your toilet stakeouts. He’s a patient of mine, a professional football player. You’ve seen his beefy face on television, endorsing a shave cream. Actually his obsessive-compulsive urge to scribble on the walls above urinals is not homosexually motivated. He hates fags, as it happens. Writes that invitation and if it is accepted, by the subsequent entry of a penciled phone number, he calls the subject, sets up a date, and beats the daylights out of him. He claims to have so persuaded a number of inverts to go straight. No, Chuck’s problem is that he wants to compete with me, thinks of himself as a therapist. That is a symptom of—”
“If I were a policeman, I would have arrested myself long ago,” said Reinhart. “Wilhelm, you say, in Northdale?”
“Say I referred you.” Munsing began to hum a tune.
“OK, I’m splitting,” said Reinhart. “Proceed with your treatment.”
“Gloria has made real progress. She now has been brought up to an acceptance of herself as a human being, if of the wrong sex. She will cross over by degrees, little details but each of massive importance: the exchange of her necktie for a string of pearls, say. That alone might take a month.”
“Then I don’t have time.”
“You’d be surprised that such simple truths as you and I would never question are precisely what the sick reject.”
In the doorway Reinhart paused to ask: “Such as?”
“Being,” said Munsing. “Existence.” In a strong baritone he began to voice the lyrics of the song he had been humming: “Baby, won’t you light my fire? …”
Reinhart had been serious enough when telling Munsing that he was not concerned about Eunice’s upbringing or the lack thereof. Look at what he himself had made of Blaine. Having sentenced himself to death—which was the only practical interpretation of what he had done—rising above life, he was gradually jettisoning the ballast of moral judgment. He had been burdened with it, made lead-footed, hunchbacked, his life long.
It would have been typical of his former self to brood on Munsing’s daughter, symbol of a social malaise, symptom of the maladie du temps, etc., and forget about his own very real, very fat girl named Winona. Eunice after all survived efficiently as long as she kept out of fast cars. She was liberated from what Reinhart believed must be the fundamental fear of women: rape.
Winona was embarrassed by movie love-scenes. Only last year she had reported to Reinhart that a pack of “mad dogs” had chased her from the back yard. He looked out and saw a gang of mongrels howling after a bitch in heat. She might have believed that mammals renewed their race by the wafting of pollen, did he not know that one of those Mr. Penis-Mrs. Vagina courses in sex instruction were incorporated into the high-school curriculum.
Though he had long since cashed in the war bonds he had bought on the Army payroll plan, Reinhart had hung onto his service life insurance. When he got married in 1946 he replaced Maw with Gen as beneficiary.
As an employee of Switched-On Boutiques, Inc., Gen had a full insurance package, and Blaine was heir to its benefits. “If anything happens to me,” she had told Reinhart, “he will take care of you.” Followed by her malignant snort and: “In a pig’s ass.”
The point was that Blaine was taken care of, and it would be ludicrous to leave anything to Maw, with her bundle. To approach the situation negatively, this left Winona.
Winona. What would become of her? The trouble with Winona was that she was pitiful. Unfortunately, Winona was a bore. Alas, being tormented by Blaine had been interesting. Even a Jew would sooner pick up Mein Kampf than the memoirs of Cal Coolidge, a good man. As a child Winona would smile when playfellows took her toys away. Her plight was serious. To make Winona the beneficiary of his GI insurance would be easy enough. To arrange the payoff required only a licensed physician to certify that the pulse reading of the insured was nil. Ergo, Winona received ten thousand dollars, the widowed Gen could marry immediately, and if Blaine ran afoul of the law he had so far evaded, the judge would take into account the suicide of his father that sent him off the rails.
Nor would it scotch the plans of Sweet & Streckfuss, that firm of organic stockbrokers. If he were willing to call it death, Bob and Hans would be under no pressure to bring him back according to an arbitrary schedule. Could take their time, Bob drumming up new corpses. “Look, he tried it. Why not you? You are dying anyway.” Nobody wanted to be first, strangely enough. The national audience had soon forgotten Sweet’s appearance on the Alp Show. No more requests for information were coming in. Not even eternal life stuck long on the magic slate of the popular mind.
Winona with ten thousand dollars. A heartwarming thought, unless one went into the details of how she might spend it: a stack of pizzas high as the Bloor Building, spaghetti Westerns every night. Why didn’t they make more films like Born Free? Winona had seen that five times. She should buy some pet too husky to kill with love. Funny about Winona, she even liked serpents. Had once mothered a garter snake she found in the yard. The constricting snakes made good house pets, he had read, were notoriously placid and sometimes even dimly affectionate. He might do worse than suggest Winona’s acquisition of a python. Worn around her neck, it would protect her from the slithering, poison-fanged people who prowled the world.
He was seated at a rosewood writing desk in his suite at the Shade-Milton Hotel. The sheet of stationery that lay before him was covered for its top third with a letterhead extolling the merits of the hotel chain. You would not choose such foolscap for your farewell note.
Reinhart picked up the phone, an instrument of ruthlessly modern design he had seen in one or two movies. It resembled an erected penis.
“Look,” he said, “at a hundred twenty-five a day I should get a piece of clean writing paper without your ad-crap at the top.”
The answer was obsequious, and soon a flunky-buzz was heard at the door, which Reinhart was enjoying the luxury of keeping unlocked, his lifelong fear of burglary now well out of mind.
A bellboy entered, carrying a ream of high-rag bond: so said the box. Reinhart tendered him a piece of currency without looking at the denomination. The lackey’s face told him it was exorbitant.
“I suppose you’re too young to have heard of ‘Calling Philip Morris,’” Reinhart said. “They used to hire midgets for your job and make them wear pillbox caps. I wonder what became of all the midgets?”
“Yeah,” said the young man, with an insinuating smile. “You wouldn’t be lonely, would you?”
“No,” said Reinhart. “I don’t want to bugger you or have you get me a call girl, whichever you are offering.”
The bellboy was not offended, as Reinhart knew he would not indeed be. You could figure people pretty well when you stopped competing with them.
Reinhart began to write with his ballpoint pen. “Dear Winona …” He had not written anything in ages, his Army pals having fallen out of communication long ago. Last year Jimmy Marsala’s widow had sent him a Merry Xmas card, telling of Jimmy’s death at the end of a long illness ten months before. Wild old, good old Jim: you guinea bastard, why didn’t you tell me you were sick? I’ll look you up in hell and kick your ass. Jimmy had gone from the service into the Mafia. Reinhart kept watching for him to turn up before the Government hearings, but he was probably not that big. “Our eldest daughter Teresa is now a sister,” his wife had scribbled. Only gangste
rs still had normal families.
Dead Jimmy. There had been a great life in him, and three ineluctable principles: A friend could do no wrong. Anybody not a friend was an enemy. An enemy was to be destroyed.
“Dear Winona …” Reinhart used to be a great letter-writer, especially to girls. Kid them along, that’s what they liked, and then swoop in for the kill: “But seriously, sometimes I think I’ll die of longing for you.”
An officer in his outfit who censored mail had told him one of his letters, to a girl named Dianne Cooley, was the funniest thing he had ever read: laughed out loud. Reinhart remembered that that one was all-solemn, as it happened. Dianne was considering a reconciliation with her husband, another soldier also on European duty, so this could not take place until after the war. Dianne loved to ruminate on such hypothetical fodder. Reinhart had known Dianne for a year before he left the States. He was in love with her without ever having made love to her. A familiar situation of his youth, when he repeatedly lost his heart to girls he never knew in the flesh and went to bed with tramps.
“Dear Winona …” Once in composing a note to his father he had suffered a slip of the pen, writing “Dead Dad” for “Dear,” which, in his then naïve orientation, had caused him some agony. Blaine, the playboy of the Western world, had candidly, guiltlessly, returned the favor twenty years later: “Why don’t you die?”
Reinhart seized a fresh sheet of paper and wrote:
Dear Blaine,
I am taking your advice. But the Freudian cliché, reflected in the old school of literature, Dostoevski and Synge, is Out. Only squares still believe that the father-figure embodies the threat of emasculation.
I suppose that as the young fogey you are, you will do the right, the right-wing, thing by the girl next door, unless the whole business was a put-on. If you want to cop out, however, there is a Dr. Wilhelm in Northdale who can handle it. Mention the name of Dr. Barker Munsing. The latter, by the way, is a specialist in sex-identity problems, if you ever have need of one.
I mention this without irony, because if I ever knew anyone who accepted his maleness, it is you. You fearlessly wear your hair and clothes in a fashion which cannot be distinguished from the female style, yet you are securely masculine in what counts. You have proved that clothing is the product of social convention. There is no fundamental reason, under the aspect of eternity, why a man should wear a suit and a woman a frock.
As to your political views, which have so often clashed with mine—
Reinhart had begun bitterly, but having lied to the effect that he did not write in irony, he found himself inadvertently going straight on the force of the assertion.
—it would be false for me to announce my sudden conversion. And grotesque. There is a genuine and natural difference between the opinions of a man of forty-four and a twenty-one-year-old. Were there not, there would be little point in continuing to age. The joy of life and also the sorrow—taken together they constitute the interest—come in and through the accumulation of moments. In middle age one looks back on as many as he looks forward to. The teetertotter is in perfect balance. At the next step it begins its downward tilt, the back end rising commensurately. The saw outranks the see: there is ever more of it towering behind. But you are still confronted by a fascinating, challenging incline, which rewards your every movement by a loss in the acuteness of its angle.
One should feel his efforts have effect. You should be gratified that your opposition to the war, to outmoded sexual attitudes, to social injustice has made its discernible mark on events. If you persist in a belief that the times they are a-changin’, they will indeed change. The whole of life, as we know it, is a construct of mind, perhaps of language. We hardly share anything, any more, with the dumb animals. Maybe human beings will even abolish death. If so, we will have removed ourselves from the evolutionary process altogether, from the status of creatures. In the oldest morality, the aim was not to be a beast. Then, with the development of machines, came subtlety. Immanuel Kant, I think it was, who made the useful distinction between men and things. Obviously, this would no longer apply if we were no longer mortal and could, as with cars, replace our vital parts when they failed.
One of the old arguments brought by the devout against atheism was that if there were no God, there would be no good and evil. And armed with that principle the true believers committed every known crime. They were succeeded by the secularists, for whom supernaturalism was the opium with which the masses were drugged to accept slavery, and I suppose in the statistical sweepstakes so popular in our time, social-totalitarianism has run up quite a score in corpses after a much shorter engagement than Christianity or Islam.
But the new composite immortal might get the brain of a sex maniac, the heart of a nun, the gonads of a cost accountant. A standoff. And the brain donor might have been a psychopath only because of a derangement in his endocrine glands: his gray matter, wired into another system, perhaps will not exude poison.
With your quick mind you will have seen the apparent fault in my example: the sex fiend, the nun, and the accountant, three persons, are lost to maintain one. Not true. Their incomplete cadavers will be frozen until mechanical devices have been developed to perform the function of the missing organs.
Neither your morality, as I understand it, nor mine will obtain in this state of affairs. They are separated by only a couple of decades, mine being a product—to put it in the terms which you, a child of the TV era, prefer—of the “generation” which came to majority in the forties. Your epoch has come along only twenty years after.
This new world will be timeless and make obsolescence itself obsolete. No more ripening and no more rot. After a few eons, no part of the father or son will be the original. The old man will have ever-renewed endurance and potency. Both will be immortal. The noble old institutions of put-on and -down, cop-out, sell-out, will have joined the divine right of kings in oblivion.
Even as you and I, for you are not all that young. It always takes a while to iron the bugs out of a new process. When the space program began they had difficulty in getting the rockets off the ground. And the physical sciences have centuries of sophistication over medicine. The trip to the moon might well have become an afternoon excursion before eternal life is a serious possibility.
By that time you will be old, at best, and low on the list of candidates for renewal, for surely if precedent is meaningful, and even though the aged or ill should obviously get first crack, men will not have changed in their partiality for vigorous youth. This will probably be all the more marked if the whole concept of youth is in danger of vanishing: man is a persistent innovator, but he also clings to old sentimentalities.
In short, you will have time to die. I used to think a lot about death when I was your age, without ever feeling it. In melancholy moments I was wont to craft farewell speeches. They were generally characterized by what I would call a noble bitterness. I had read The Mayor of Casterbridge and was much impressed by the hero’s valedictory wish to be buried in an unmarked grave. I had not yet done anything from which an untimely death could have resulted, except by pure chance—and I limited the opportunities of fate by never sitting beneath a tree in a lightning storm, by treating cuts promptly, by keeping my life jacket nearby during travel on water.
Yet I was ready in fantasy. But when I got into a lethal situation, with the Army in Berlin, I did not recognize it as such. My friend and I got into a fight with some black marketers. Before I knew it he was knifed to death. I apparently killed one of them, suffocated him or broke his spine—I don’t quite remember and don’t want to. It seemed so long ago only a few days later. I have never been a man of action, even when in action, though I was strong in those days as a result of weight-lifting I had done while in high school. You have hated sports. I never cared for the group ones. I have always been a loner, in a lifetime of preparation for a lonely death—and now I shall not die one.
You will not understand that statement, and you wou
ld not care one way or another if you did. It is even likely that you will not have read this far in the letter. Which is OK by me, because I am not writing it to you. Maybe you have seen the TV rerun of the old Marx Bros. picture in which Groucho, asking Chico to sign a contract, gives him a pen without ink. But that’s OK, because Chico cannot write anyway.
But they agree: “We’ve got a contract!”
So have you and I.
YOUR LOVING FATHER
Reinhart found a matchbook imprinted with the name of the hotel. He watched the letter go up in smoke in one of the super-sized ashtrays with which the suite was furnished.
19
Dear Genevieve,
When you receive this I will be not only gone but dead. You may proceed with your plans without hindrance. I am changing beneficiaries from you to Winona, not out of revenge, but because you can take care of yourself.
Faithfully,
CARLO REINHART
He would not burn this one, but mail it on the last day.
Which left Maw, as well as Winona. But there was nothing to tell your mother when you were rearranging fate’s schedule and dying before her. She would be jealous enough without his aggravating it by mail.
He seized the phone book instead and looked up Dr. Wilhelm, who was there all right, with a Northdale number.
“When will he be in?” he asked the answering service.
“You can’t ever reach him directly. He has to call you back.”
Having nothing to do while he waited, Reinhart decided to eat. He had unintentionally fasted all day.
“Room service?” the operator cried in disbelief. “It’s now one A.M. They close the kitchen at ten.”
“Look at your board,” said Reinhart. “This is the suite where Eisenhower stayed overnight in 1956. I too am a veteran, and I am paying one twenty-five a day.”
It now amazed him that he had got the writing paper so easily; perhaps there was some sort of cutoff of services at midnight. She switched on the night manager, who sniveled about unions, but eventually Reinhart was delivered a ham-and-Swiss on rye and a bottle of That Bud, That’s Beer. But he was not hungry. As a boy he had never eaten Swiss cheese. Another kid told him the holes were made by worms, keeping him off it for a good five years. He took the piece out of the sandwich before him and looked through the orifices at the wall of golden fiberglass drapery, behind which were presumably windows giving onto a night-lit city under a sky of a thousand stars.