At twelve noon, each and every day, his father took the elevator down from his fifth-floor apartment on Collins Avenue and Lincoln Road, bought the Miami Herald and the New York Daily News at the drugstore on the corner, and read both papers cover to cover while eating his lunch in a deli on Washington. He always ordered the same thing for lunch. A cheese omelet and a bottle of cream soda. “Too much coffee is no good for you,” he said, and then demonstrated the premise with trembling hands and a stuttering, “It m-m-m-makes you n-n-n-nervous.” He strolled up Collins Avenue after lunch each day — “It’s terrible now, full of Cuban prostitutes, even in broad daylight” — as far as Twenty-first Street, and then walked back to the apartment to take a nap before dinner and his nightly card game. He told David that he usually had dinner with one or another of the widows in his building. “I reciprocate, don’t worry,” he said. “I help them do their shopping, I buy them an ice cream cone every now and then. Listen, do you know what dinner out would cost me every night? Six or seven dollars a night, am I right? This way I’m ahead of the game.”
Elvira Brufani on the third floor prepared spaghetti and meatballs (his favorite Italian restaurant gourmet dish) every Tuesday and Thursday night. Elvira had been married to a barber who’d passed away last June. “The man was very wealthy, David, he owned a chain of shops all across Manhattan. She gets dividends on blue-chip stocks every month.” On Mondays and Wednesdays, his dinners were prepared by a woman named Shirley Levinson, whose husband had been “a wealthy garment manufacturer” and who cooked kreplach, borscht, perogin, boiled beef, knadls, “and a lot of other delicious stuff like your mother used to make, aleha ha-shalom.” On Fridays and Sundays, he ate in the apartment of a woman forbiddingly named Harriet Hammer — “No relation to the private eye,” he said, his eyes twinkling — who was a meat-and-potatoes, no-nonsense dame, the female equivalent, to hear him tell it, of Morris Weber himself.
In March, listening to his father, still not knowing that Bessie even existed, David suspected that Harriet Hammer was the sole recipient of his lingering sexual urges. “I spend a little time with her, you know, after dinner. The others, I usually go straight to my card game.” David also suspected, from little hints his father dropped, that Harriet was a black woman, and he could only guess at what down-home fare his father might be enjoying every Friday and Sunday night. In Harriet’s soul-food kitchen, did his father order chitlins, hominy grits, ham hocks, black-eyed peas, buttermilk, and a little shtup on the side?
Better than this rotten pastrami, for sure, David thought.
Such a change, such a change.
He wondered again when the change had taken place. He hadn’t been that way all along, had he? Surely not. Not with David’s mother there to restrain him. Then it must have happened after she died. He must have decided then and there to begin living the life he’d really wanted to live all along.
Clear out all this junk, and I could make a nice room for my sewing machine.
Esther, it’s my hobby!
His hobby, all of his hobbies, had overtaken his life.
David suddenly wondered how long he’d known all those women who were panting for his arrival in New York. Was one of them wearing a pair of diamond earrings that had cost four hundred and twenty-five dollars plus tax back in 1953? And how about all the women down here who wined and dined him on alternate nights? Was there also an obliging widow who fed him on Saturday? Bessie, maybe? Had Bessie known before this morning about the women in New York? Did she know about the women right here in Miami Beach? Jesus, he thought, what can any woman possibly find to love or even like about that meddling, miserly, opinionated, grasping, ungiving, unshaven, unwashed, unsightly, short little son of a — I don’t mean that, he thought.
Pop, I don’t mean that.
I’m sorry, Pop, I didn’t mean it.
Don’t die, Pop, he thought.
Please don’t die.
The waiting-room family was changing.
Mrs. Daniels and her fat daughter Louise were not there for the two o’clock visit. Neither was Mr. Di Salvo. Mrs. Horowitz was the only familiar face. Flushed and excited, she took a seat beside David and immediately lit a cigarette.
“So how’s your father?” she asked.
“All right, I suppose.”
“They did the operation?”
“Yes.”
“What did they find?”
“Nothing.”
“Doctors,” she said, and let out a stream of smoke. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Weber, I never want to get as old as my mother is. The minute I can’t lift my own valise, that’s it. I’ll take a pill. Thirty seconds, it’ll be all over.”
“What kind of pill could you take?” a young woman across the room asked. She was a tall redhead wearing white slacks and a tight black sweater. She was very proud of her breasts. She kept toying with a strand of pearls dangling between her breasts. The woman sitting beside her, a few years older, David guessed, was also redheaded. She was wearing white shorts and a tomato-colored tube top. Her breasts were as spectacular as the other woman’s, but she had nothing dangling between them, nothing with which to toy. The Dolly Sisters, David thought. Ike and Mike.
“They have these pills,” Mrs. Horowitz said. “Like the Nazis had during the war. You bite on them, and it’s all over.”
“I wouldn’t want to bite on a pill,” one of the Dolly Sisters said.
“It would taste bitter,” the other one said.
“They have pills that aren’t bitter,” Mrs. Horowitz said.
“Where do you get these pills?”
“From your doctor. He’ll prescribe them. You tell him you can’t lift your own valise, he’ll prescribe a pill. Thirty seconds and good-bye.”
“I’d rather die in my sleep,” a man sitting near the television set said. He was short and fat and wearing a business suit and tie.
“Or on a tennis court,” one of the Dolly Sisters said.
“After a great serve,” the other one said.
“An ace,” the first one said.
“What’s an ace?” Mrs. Horowitz asked.
“When your opponent can’t even reach it,” one of the Dolly Sisters explained.
“A heart attack on a tennis court. That’s better than a bitter pill,” the other one said.
“Life is a bitter pill,” the man in the business suit said philosophically.
The real danger is living, David thought.
“Live to be like my mother in there?” Mrs. Horowitz asked. “What for? Hitting her own daughter? Telling me not to come see her anymore? What for?”
“My brother had a heart attack,” the man in the business suit said. “But not on a tennis court. And it didn’t kill him.”
“How old is he?” Mrs. Horowitz said.
“Seventy-eight.”
“Seventy-five is what I want,” Mrs. Horowitz said. “That’s enough. Who wants people carrying my valises? Twenty more years, that’s enough.”
“Wait till you’re seventy-five, though,” one of the Dolly Sisters said. “You won’t think it’s enough then.”
“You won’t think it’s nearly enough,” the other one said.
“There are very active people at seventy-five,” the man in the business suit said.
“We were on a cruise last year,” one of the Dolly Sisters said, “there were seventy-five-year-old sex fiends on it. Am I right, Helen?”