After he had devoured the pork chops he said he shouldn’t have been eating, apparently forgetting his earlier fears of an imminent angina attack, he ordered coffee and dessert, and went off to the bathroom while the waitress, frightened by his imperious air, scurried out to the kitchen. When he came back to the table, he said, “There are no paper towels in the bathroom. I told them. I asked them what I was supposed to dry my hands on — my shirttails?” Sitting, he suddenly smiled and said, “Confucius say, ‘Woman who cook carrots and peas in same pot unsanitary.’ What’s taking her so long with that coffee?”
The sugar bowl contained little packets of sugar, each one imprinted with a different astrological sign. He looked through the bowl for his own sign, and then read aloud and with obvious delight the character analysis printed below the symbol. “Pisces is a water sign. You are endowed with charity, sympathy, and sensitivity. Your colors are sea blues or greens. Your stones are aquamarine or coral. Your plants are water lilies or ferns.” Nodding with pleasure, he began searching through the bowl for packets of sugar imprinted with the other eleven astrological signs.
“My friends’ll get a kick out of these,” he said, arranging them on the table before him. “The people I play cards with.” Then, to David’s astonishment, he began stuffing the packets of sugar into his jacket pocket.
“Pop!” David said, shocked.
“What is it?” his father said, looking up sharply, surprised by his tone.
“Don’t steal the sugar, huh, Pop?” David said, and tried a weak smile.
“Steal it?” his father said. “What?”
David was glancing nervously past his father’s shoulder toward the swinging kitchen doors, fearful that the waitress might reappear just as he was engaged in his act of petty larceny.
“Pop,” he said evenly, “you’re embarrassing me, really. Molly and I come here all the time. Please put that sugar back in the bowl.”
“We’re paying for this sugar,” his father said. “It’s included in the price of the meal.”
“Not a dozen packets of it.”
“Suppose I want to use a dozen packs in my coffee?”
“You drink your coffee without sugar or milk,” David said. His heart was pounding.
“What difference does that make?” his father said. “For every person who drinks it black, there’s another person who uses two, three, four packs of sugar. They figure on such things, David. It’s called shrinkage. When I was still in business, I...”
“Shrinkage is stealing,” David said.
“Baloney,” his father said, and did not return the packets to the sugar bowl. The waitress appeared a moment later with his coffee and dessert. He took one sip, looked up at her, said, “This is ice cold, bring me some hot coffee, will you, please? Do you know what the word hot means?”
He did not once mention Bessie on that trip in March.
The first David learned of her was when she called to tell him his father was in the hospital.
“I’m a good friend of his,” she said, “we play cards together, I give him dinner sometimes.”
The “friends” he described during dinner that night were a group of men and women approximately his own age, with whom he played cards every night. The games they played varied from bridge to penny-ante poker to gin rummy at a nickel a point. They played in various apartments and hotel rooms on the beach — but never in his father’s apartment. “Why should I have card players in?” he asked. “They spill drinks, they drop ashes on the carpet, who needs them making ashes of themselves?” he said, and smiled. He himself, David thought, scattered ashes as though they were the vestiges of countless cremated bodies. His vest — he almost always wore a vest — was a favorite target, but neither did he neglect his lap, or the tablecloth, or Molly’s prized Oriental rugs, or indeed anywhere or anyplace but an ashtray. He lighted a cigar now, blowing out puffs of noxious smoke that obliterated the table and almost suffocated David. “I’m smoking only good cigars these days,” he said, puffing out smoke. David could not remember what his “bad” cigars smelled like, but he suspected they must have been poisonous.
His father had become an expert on everything. That his expertise was based on a combination of folklore, pretense, and total ignorance seemed not to trouble him in the slightest. In the car on the way back to the apartment, a radio newscaster was talking about two New York City cops who’d been shot when they stopped a speeding automobile. “It was their own fault,” his father said. “They should have approached the car one on either side of it. That way, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot both of them.” He had no knowledge, of course, about whether the cops had flanked the suspect vehicle, or approached it head on, or indeed crawled into it through an open window. But here was the learned Scotland Yard inspector, holding forth on established police techniques as though he himself had prevented a thousand holdups in his time, oblivious to the didactic sound of his own voice, knowing only that he would have handled the situation differently and better.
In similar fashion, the moment they entered the apartment again, he advised David first that he ought to convince The Shiksa to paint the walls in different colors instead of the awful white they were now painted — “You’ll have to get permission from the landlord, you know” — even though David and Molly were perfectly content with the clean, expansive look of the place, and then suggested that they add on another guest room by dividing their large living room in half — “What would that cost you, another wall? Two, three thousand bucks at the most? I’ll let you have the money if you’re short.” (How generous you are with my money, David thought, and was immediately contrite afterward.) His father also informed him that the new wallpaper in the powder room was too quiet (“Couldn’t you find something a little jazzier?”), asked if he thought Molly would like him to send some coupons that would give her a ten-cent discount the next time she bought instant coffee, and wondered aloud if David ever said the kaddish on the anniversary of his mother’s death each year (“Do you ever even go to temple anymore? It isn’t right to become godless, you know” — this forty-five minutes after eating pork chops), his brown eyes misting over as they always did when he spoke of the dear departed wife whose mink and otter he’d refused to dispense with as per her wishes, sprinkling cigar ashes on the newly upholstered couch and stinking up the entire living room with his El Ropo fumes.
Comfortably seated, puffing smoke, his father explained his daily Miami Beach routine. He awakened at eight each morning, prepared himself a breakfast of orange juice, corn flakes with sliced bananas, a cup of coffee drunk black as always, and a toasted English muffin spread with strawberry jam and either cream cheese or butter. He then retired to his bathroom for his morning toilet. He shaved every other day, and he used to shower every day until he had to begin stacking his plates in the bathtub because all the closets were full. “You should see those plates, David, they’re beautiful.” He now took a sponge bath each and every day, he told David with some pride, as though he alone in a city of unwashed barbarians observed any sanitary rules at all. After breakfast, he went into the living room, spread out his correspondence on the table there, and methodically answered each and every letter he received from relatives and friends all over the United States. (He had surprised David on his visit last September by scanning the pages of the Bronx telephone directory to “see if there’s any Webers still living up there.”) He told David that he never wrote twice to anybody who didn’t immediately answer one of his letters. “Why should I waste time with delinquents?” he said.