“Say hello to your mother.”
I hadn’t seen her. Like many people who have learned the secret of living together, Father and Mother slept in separate suites, but now twin beds, Father in one, Mother in the other, had replaced Father’s fourposter. A nightstand stood between them — I remembered it from Grandmother Newpert’s summer house in Edgarton — on which, arranged like two entrenched armies, were two sets of medicines, Father’s bright ceremonial pills and May Day capsules, and Mother’s liquids in their antique apothecary bottles (she supplied the druggist with these bottles herself, insisting out of her willful aesthetic sense that all her prescriptions be placed in them), with their water glasses and a shiny artillery of teaspoons. Mother herself seemed to be sleeping. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t noticed her, or perhaps it was the angle, Father’s bed being the closer as I walked into the room. Or perhaps it was her condition itself, sickness an effacement. I hesitated.
“It’s all right,” Father said. “She’s awake. You’re not disturbing her.”
“Her eyes are closed,” I said softly to Father.
“I have been seeing double in the morning, Brewster darling,” Mother said. “It gives me megrim to open them.”
“Mother, you naughty slugabed,” I teased. Sometimes being a gentleman can be a pain in the you-know-where, to oneself as well as to others. Well, it’s often fatuous, and in emergency it always is, as anything is in emergency short of an uncivilized scream, but what can you do, a code is a code. One dresses for dinner in the jungle and surrenders one’s sword to the enemy and says thank you very much and refuses the blindfold. “Shame on you, sweetheart, the sun up these several hours and you still tucked in.”
“It’s cancer, Son,” Father said in a low tone not meant for Mother.
“Lazybones,” I scolded, swallowing hard.
“Oh, I do want to see you, Brewster,” Mother said. “Perhaps if I opened just one little eye—”
“Not at all, you sweet dear. If you must lie in bed all day I think it best that you do some honest sleeping. I’ll still be here when you finally decide to get up.”
“There, that’s better,” Mother said, opening her right eye and scowling at me.
“Please, honeybunch, you’ll see double and get megrim.”
“Brewster, it’s lovely. It makes you twice as handsome, twice as tall.”
“Please, Mother—”
“Let her, Brew. This is a deathbed.”
“Father!”
“Why are you so shocked, Brewster? It had to happen someday.”
“I think I’ll close it now.”
“Really, Father, a deathbed…”
“Since it upsets him so.”
“Well, deathbeds then.”
“But I reserve the right to open it again whenever I choose. If a cat can look at a king…”
“Father, aren’t you being — that’s right, darling, shut it, shut it tight — the slightest bit melodramatic?”
“Oh, for Lord’s sake, Brew, don’t be prissy. Mother and I are going, she of cancer, I of everything. Rather than waste the little time we have left together, we might try to get certain things straight.”
“When Father called you back from overseas he arranged with Mrs. Lucas to have these twin deathbeds set up in here.”
Mrs. Lucas is the housekeeper. She used to give me my baths when I was a child. I always try to remember to bring her a picnic hamper or some other especially nice premium from the bank when I come home for a visit. Over the years Mrs. Lucas has had chaises longues, card tables, hammocks and many powerful flashlights from me — a small fortune in merchandise.
“What were you doing in the Middle East in the first place? Those people aren’t your sort, Brew.”
“He did it for you, darling. He thought that by putting both deathbeds in the same room you wouldn’t have to shuffle back and forth between one chamber and the next. It’s a time-space thing, Noel said. Isn’t that right, Noel?”
“Something like that. Yes, Nora.”
“Father, the Jewish are darned impressive. They run their military like a small family business. The Arabs can’t touch them.”
“Arabs, Jews. In my time a country club was a country club. I don’t understand anything anymore.”
“Don’t quarrel, Noel, Brew. Brew, you’re the reason we decided to have deathbeds in the first place. Well, my family has always had them, of course. None of this hole-and-corner hospital stuff for them. I don’t speak against hospitals, mind you, they’re all very well if you’re going to get better, but, goodness, if you’re really dying it’s so much more pleasant for the immediate family if they can be saved from those drafty, smelly hospital corridors. Grandmother Oh herself, though she invented the oxygen tank, refused the tent when her time came if it meant going to a hospital.”
“Brr.”
“Are you addressing me, Father?”
“What? No, no, I have a chill.”
“Let me help you.” I lifted his legs into the bed gently, took the glass out of his hand and set it down, unpeeling the $100 bill as if it were a beer label. I placed his head back on the pillow and, smoothing the sheets, started to cover him when he grinned.
“Close cover before striking,” he said hoarsely. That broke the ice and we all laughed.
“Nothing important ever gets said in a hospital,” Father said after a while. “There’s too much distraction. The room, the gadgets, the flowers and who sent what, the nurses coming in for one thing or another. Nothing important gets said.”
I nodded.
“Mother’s right, Brewster. The deathbed has been a tradition in our family. This twin bed business is a little vulgar, perhaps, but it can’t be helped. We’ll have a deathbed vigil. It’s a leisure thing. It’s elegant.”
“Please, Father, let’s not have any more of this morbid stuff about dying,” I said, getting the upper hand on myself. “It’s my notion you’re both goldbricking, that you’ll be out on the links again in no time, your handicap lower than ever.”
“It’s heart, Brew,” Father said gloomily. “It’s Ménière’s disease. It’s TB and a touch of MS that hangs on like a summer cold. It’s a spot of Black Lung.”
“Black Lung?”
“Do you know how many matches I’ve struck in my time?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, Father, if there were another slogan in you yet. ‘I Would Rather Light an Ashenden Match Than Curse the Darkness.’ How’s that?”
“Too literary. What the smoker wants is something short and sweet. No, there’ll be no more slogans. Let others carry on my work. I’m tired.”
“There’s this Israeli ace,” I said as a stopgap, “Izzy Heskovitz, who’s…”
“What’s this about a duel, Brewster?” Father asked.
“Oh, did you hear about that? I should have thought the Prince would have wanted it hushed up, after what happened.”
“After what happened? He thinks you’re mad. And so do I. Exposing yourself like that, offering a target like a statesman in an open car, then tossing your pistol into the sea. It was irresponsible. Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“It was a question of honor.”
“With you, Brewster, everything is a question of honor.”
“Everything is.”
“Stuff and nonsense.”
“I’m looking for myself.”
“Brewster, you are probably the last young man in America still looking for himself,” Father said. “As a man who has a certain experience with slogans, I have some sense of when they have lost their currency.”