He went to the extension phone in his father’s bedroom expecting to find a space on the dial for the office or even a “7” for room service, but it was an ordinary phone. (Though actually it wasn’t. It was a custom job in a felt-lined box like a case for dueling pistols. If its lid hadn’t been raised he would never have noticed it.) He had to hunt around for a directory (he found it in an antique sword case, a rebuilt McCormack Plaza phoenixy on the front cover) and look up the number of Harris Towers. A salesman told him that the girl he had spoken to and who had promised to find out where they had taken his father had gone to lunch. Leaving the apartment, he went downstairs, the key to someone else’s apartment in his pocket somehow reassuring and making him feel lucky. He walked four blocks to a drugstore and looked up the details of his father’s burial in the Tribune.
The body was at Pfizer’s Funeral Home in a coffin the color of the appliances in his father’s kitchen. The coffin was open and he saw that his father had grown long hair, sideburns, a mustache. The effect — the shirt beneath his Edwardian blazer was a wallpaper print, his tie, cut from the same cloth, almost invisible against it — was oddly healthy, obscurely powerful. “It sounds crazy,” a director whispered, “but hippies make a terrific appearance in a box.” It was true; his father seemed to glow. He looked marvelous, solider in death than in life, though Marshall hadn’t seen him since he’d grown his new hair and bought his new wardrobe.
He felt no particular grief, only a curious letdown, and wanted to explore this. The only person there he knew was Joe Cane, a business associate of his father. “Don’t get me wrong,” Marshall said. They had gone outside to smoke. “I loved him a lot. I’m fucked up like a jigsaw puzzle, but he had nothing to do with that. My life is largely unexamined, Joe, but he was a sensible guy. He didn’t give me bad times. And he gave me good advice. He was against my going into the lecture business. Even in my senior year at college, I was pulling three hundred, sometimes four hundred bucks for a lecture. It started as a gag, you know. I wrote a parody of a travel lecture—‘Mysterious Minneapolis’—and my roommate sent a copy of it to this bureau. That’s how I first got started with them. Pop came up when I did it in St. Paul and laughed harder than anybody, but afterwards he told me not to count on it.”
“He should never have retired,” Cane said, a tiny well-dressed man who looked the same now as he had in the Forties. Cane reminded Marshall of Roosevelt. Thinner, he had the old President’s handsome sobriety and looked always a little worried. Marshall respected him. He appeared a talisman of responsibility and competence. The manager of the Chicago office of the firm for which his father traveled, he had always seemed mysterious. He had lived in an orphanage until he was seventeen. (Cane was not his name, Joe wasn’t. He had become that person — this was the mystery — out of some other person.) He was totally self-made. There were Book-of-the-Month Club selections in his house and on the desk in his office.
“He was tired out, Joe. The road exhausted him.”
“He could have worked in the office. He could have written his own ticket.”
“He was a salesman.”
“He could have sold from the office. The costume jewelry business isn’t what it was, but buyers still come to Chicago. He could have hired college boys to work his territory and seen the buyers here. He could have used the telephone more. Lots of men do it.”
“I don’t know.”
“It was jealousy. He didn’t want anybody to think he was working for me. He couldn’t stand me. I loved Phil, but he always had a resentment against me.”
“That’s silly. Why would he be jealous? He was a very dynamic man.”
“He was the Wabash Cannonball, but he was jealous. Always. I was an executive and he was a salesman. I didn’t make more money. He made more money, though I got more benefits. As an executive I was entitled to extra stock options. He resented that.”
“He loved being a salesman.”
“He hated it. He wanted his own desk in his own office and his own secretary, not somebody from the typing pool. He wanted ceremony. When the firm took over the seventh floor of the Great Northern Building I worked my can off to get him that office. New York wanted the space for a showroom. He thought it was me blocking him.”
“Jesus, Joe, please don’t talk this way about him. You make him sound small.”
“Small? He was Yellowstone National Park. Only pipsqueaks like me have decorum and character. Men like Phil are mad and petty and great.”
“He was fond of you.”
“No. I was fond of him, but he always bad-mouthed me to the New York people. He despised me. May he rest.”
“Stick with me, please, Joe. Don’t go home early. Get me over the hurdles tonight when his friends show up. Some of them will be people from the South Side and I won’t know them anymore. The rest I won’t ever have seen. It’s going to be rough.”
But there were no hurdles. It was not rough, not at least in the sense he’d anticipated. If he felt no grief, then neither did anyone else. They came to the chapel — not a big crowd, but respectable — stood shyly at the coffin for a few moments and then went back to the outer rooms. He recognized many of them, men and women his parents had played cards with when he was a child, and was surprised at his ability to recall their names. When they offered their condolences he offered their names. “Thanks, Rose. Thank you, Jerry. It was good of you to come, Maxine. I was very sorry to hear about Arnold.” Their first names odd in his mouth and vaguely forbidden (he’d known them as a child), granting him — Ph.D. manqué, ex-lecturer from the ex-lecture circuit, a man with a large scrapbook almost filled, a man with clippings — a sense of graciousness, a snug sensation of being their host.
The new people, friends his father had made at the condominium, moved with a sort of nervous bustle, more distraught then the others because they had known him less long and more recently. They were the ones who told him that they’d seen him only last Tuesday or Thursday and that he’d seemed fine, tiptop, that he’d done five laps of the pool and hadn’t been a bit winded, that they were supposed to play bridge together next week, that they had had a date to go to a restaurant, that he was talking about a trip to Europe, that he was thinking about getting a part-time job. But even these neighbors could register only surprise at sudden, generalized death, their anecdotes about his last days and last plans unremarkable, borrowing their importance from the irony built into all death. He realized that no one was very unhappy, and indeed it developed that several of them — from both camps — had come merely to explain that they would not be able to attend the funeral. His earlier sense of being their host deserted him, and he began to feel that had he been more impressive as a survivor he would somehow have focused their grief. His use of their names was lost on them, and even this, his single resource, was unavailable to him with the new people. He explained a little of this to Joe Cane, thanking him for coming and telling him he could leave now if he wanted. “Don’t think I want to steal my father’s show,” he said, “but it’s getting trivial. Nobody’s upset, just glum.”