But here I was, twenty years later, with six papers overdue, and this time there was no way for my brother to write them. So I did the uncharacteristic part. I went to a hypnotist, a Chinese hypnotist. Well, I almost did not go, but when somebody gave me his name and phone number I made an appointment. The voice at the other end of the telephone line was Oriental, and the name, as I understood it, was Dr. Hoy Lee. By the time I decided to cancel, I had lost the number, there was no Dr. Hoy Lee in the phone book. I kept the appointment. The doctor was Oriental but his name was Hoyle Leigh. What makes you think I can help you? he asked. I said, Well, you can help people to stop smoking, to lower their blood pressure. It is not a reasonable expectation of life to write sonnets, but it is more natural than not to write papers for school. He said, all right, but no more than one visit, two visits at most. The odd thing was this, it almost worked.
The truth was, there was something in the ice cube. I don’t like this mode. Tell about the scandal at the tennis courts, Smiley, the handgun. Helplessness, your professional capacity. I mean, has she no occupation, what does she do for a living? Well, she frets. Fretting is not an occupation. Yes it is; for a spy, a reporter, a scholar, many people. Dayshift. Nightshift. Watchers of soap operas. Can the Rich Write. Tell about lunch with the vedette; and Ben, and the garland, and the swami with the baby in his arms. And, in the matter of the Irish thing. But do you sometimes wish it was me?
The punchline can remain in families when the joke, such as it was, has long eroded. Where is my poison, my father used to say, every single morning, as he took the mild medication that had been prescribed for his arthritis. He believed his tablets to be very strong, however, and took them with considerable ceremony. Where is my poison? he would say, quite loudly, and my mother would hand him the small bottle of pills. One weekend, in my junior year at college, Sally came to visit. At breakfast, we spoke of the dog, Bayard, the Great Dane; never having been much of a watchdog, he had barked a bit the night before. Where is my poison? my father said, and Sally, who was in considerable awe of him already, leaped to her feet and, crying No! upset her cup of coffee.
Long years later, in fact quite recently, I had what may have been a similar misunderstanding, though without, so far as I could tell, any ingredient of horror. I was in an English country house, on a shooting weekend. Everything, the house, the trees, the countryside, the dogs, the river, was beautiful. The retrieving dogs were all enormous Labradors. The hostess’s personal pet, however, was a small, golden spaniel, which for the most part trotted by her side. Several times, the lady mentioned that this spaniel’s front teeth were missing. I felt some response or comment was expected of me. She had found these teeth embedded in the rear end of a three-legged greyhound, another of her pets. She found it remarkable that so small a spaniel should manage, or even try to bite so much taller a dog as this three-legged greyhound. When she actually bent down to show me the spaniel’s jaw, where the teeth were missing, I asked, Did you remove them? Heavens no! she said; its congenital, a calcium deficiency. And I realized that she thought I had asked whether she had removed the fourth leg of the greyhound. No, No, I meant the teeth, I said; did you remove them? And she said, Why yes, as soon as I found them. But the exchange was relatively calm.
Here’s how matters stand at the tennis court. I have played there since I was ten, when there was just one court, outdoors, clay, surrounded on three sides by a wire fence. Now there are five courts, one under a large wooden structure, two under bubble tops, and two outdoors between the old court and the long, sloping meadow, where the backboard used to be. The meadow stretches some distance, right down to the firehouse. All the town’s ambulances are still run, not out of the hospital but out of the local firehouses, and manned not by doctors but by firemen. Two years ago, I came into a little house where the court phone and office and showers are, along with the Coke machine, on top of which there is a television set that kids of the players, kids of the pro, kids waiting for lessons watch all day long, I walked in and saw on the couch a man so pale, and obviously ill, and sweating that I asked at once whether I could do something, and only realized seconds later that I knew him, that he was Morty Stone, the young internist who, when he first came to town, brought with him, along with his clear contempt for the local general practitioners, the modern notion of telling people, frankly, whether they wanted to know or not, what the prognosis was, whether they were dying, along with the old commitment to keep them alive, by whatever means, at whatever cost and in whatever pain. There was Morty, then, who had treated my grandmother, in fact, and wanted to tell her the worst and then operate and hold down on the drugs, but who was, quite simply, overriden by Dr. Mills, our family doctor, in actual charge of the case. It was Morty, then, who lay there. What he had done, actually, was just to dislocate his shoulder. The friends, all doctors, with whom he had been playing, were out on the court again, where, with the fifth of their group, they had resumed their Wednesday doubles. I thought this heartless of them, but they had done what they could for him, and I guess they could not bear to watch him now, with that look, the cold, the unmistakable pallor, of a man who, though his injury is minor in every sense but one, is badly hurt. He didn’t want company in any case. What he wanted, all he wanted, was morphine. The pro’s young son had run to the firehouse, the ambulance was on its way; in due course, Morty was on his way to the hospital and his shot of morphine. I don’t know whether or how it affected his dealing with patients, but I suspect Morty had never been in that kind of pain before. In any event, though he dropped in at the court three days later, with his arm in a sling, and though he had played every Tuesday and Thursday for years, and though the injured shoulder healed completely, he never quite brought himself to play tennis again. Never to this day, I mean. Maybe someday he will start again.
But now, here’s how matters stand at the tennis court. There is the scandal, in which all of us are, to some degree, taken up. And at the firehouse, there has been a tragedy in the course of which two men, the first in the town’s history to be killed in the line of duty, are, as it turns out, with perfect futility and for no reason, dead. The two men, friends since high school, were in their late thirties, legendary. One had been a football hero; the other, the smaller of the two, was famous, miles around, for this: he was able to eat eleven wieners in twenty-two bites. The way the two men died was this. A roof and three floors of a factory fell on them. They had gone in to rescue a man who ought to have been in there but was not. And in the matter of the Irish thing.