The Essential Ellison Part 53

And still it happens down there. Viola Liuzzo was a white woman, and it made headlines. But the red mud of Alabama covers the corpses of hundreds of nameless black folk, who never made headlines. They never even got their names on tombstones.

Time to pay dues? Yeah, that's what it is, friends. Mea Culpa time in the country of the blind, our country, and we've been so blind, so long, it may be too late to see the light.

It ain't enough to say oh them poor poor people down there. It ain't enough to say well, h.e.l.l, they have killings in Chicago and on the New York subways, too. It ain't enough to send a buck to SNCC or CORE. It ain't enough when you start matching up all the parlor liberalism against the body blood soaking into that Alabama countryside. It ain't enough.

The tide of history is washing higher and higher. It cannot long be held back by hooded murderers too cowardly to come out in daylight. It's coming, thank the Lord, and if you listen, you can hear the sound of it beating against the rock and crumbling walls of racism and evil...

Hear it? Listen closely, hear it?

Hoop-de-hoop. Hoop-de-hoop. Uh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

My Father As if emerging from a dark dream, it suddenly occurs to me that I've spent at least half my life looking for my father.

No, don't get it wrong: I'm not a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I was born in University Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, at 2:20 PM on 27 May 1934, to Louis Laverne Ellison and Serita Rosenthal Ellison...so I know who my father was. And right here on my birth certificate, which I'm looking at, it asks in a little box: Legitimate? (Which is about as chill shot a way of asking it as I've ever seen.) But, happily for my mother and unhappily for my biographers, it says right back, and snappishly: yes.

So when I say I've spent half my adult life looking for my old man, I don't mean it like something out of Victor Hugo. (Though it now occurs in the wake of the first realization-and how strange that one awakening of curiosity firecrackers into other awarenesses, seriatim-that I've written a number of stories in which kids are looking for their fathers, for one reason or another, to suit the plot. The one that pops to mind foremost was called "No Fourth Commandment," and it was about a kid who was looking for his father, whom he'd never known, to kill him for f.u.c.king-over his mother. Sold the story after its magazine publication to Route 66, where it was adapted into a teleplay by a guy named Larry Marcus, and was ret.i.tled "A Gift for a Warrior." It aired on January 18th, 1963, almost a year to the day after I arrived in Los Angeles from Back East, and years later Marcus and the producer of Route 66, Herbert Leonard, did it as the basis of their film Going Home, without paying me for its second adaptation, but that's another story and my attorney is in the process of talking to them about it, so let's get back to the point.) My father died in 1949, when I was fifteen. And I'd lived with him and my mother, off and on, for those fifteen years, but I never really knew him, or even much about him. It wasn't till my mother was very ill, three or four years ago, and she thought it was allover, that she spilled some very heavy data about Louis Laverne.

There's a lot of it she won' t be happy if I relate. It is silly, of course, it's all forty and more years gone, but family skeletons rattle loudest in the minds of those who live in memories, which is where my mother's at. Today is nowhere nearly as important as all the yesterdays with my father. So I won' t go into the circ.u.mstances of how my father practiced dentistry in Cleveland for eleven years. That's a story for another time, years from now.

For openers, like me, my father was a short man. Even shorter than me, I recall. I'm 5'5", for the record. He was incredibly gentle: I remember once, when I'd done something outstandingly s.h.i.tty as a child, he was compelled to take me into the cellar and use the "strap" on me. His belt. Now perceive, please, that there is no faintest scintilla of hatred in this recollection. He was not a brutal man, and about as given to corporal punishment as Albert Schweitzer. But it was a time in this country when such things were expected of a father. "You just wait till your father comes home!" was the maternal cry, and one feared with only half a fear, because I knew my Dad just couldn't do such things.

But, as I say, on one occasion the punishment fit the crime-perhaps it was the time I shoved Johnny Mummy off the garage roof while we were playing Batman and Robin-and my Dad took me down into the cellar at 89 Harmon Drive in Painesville, Ohio, and he walloped me good.

I got over the stinging in about an hour, though there was a dull remembered pain for weeks thereafter.

My father became ill. He went upstairs into his bedroom and he cried. He wasn't himself for several weeks after. Of course, I knew none of that at the time.

He was gentle, and he looked like, well, the closest way I can describe him was that he resembled a short Brian Donlevy. If you're not hip to who Brian Donlevy is, check out the Late Late Show.

When he was a little boy, my father worked on riverboats, as a candy butcher. From that job he got into working minstrel shows. He sang. Really fine voice, even in later years. In fact, he had his photo on the sheet music of "My Yiddishe Momma," a song Al Jolson made famous; the song was written by a friend of Dad's, who dedicated it to my father's mother...whom I never met. Never met my paternal grandfather, either.

Dad wanted to be a dentist, and he wound up practicing in Cleveland. Around Prohibition time. He was such a sensational dentist, I'm told, that the mob used to come to him for their mouthwork. My mother worked as his receptionist after they'd been married awhile, and she tells me when the gangsters came to get drilled and filled, my Dad insisted they check their heat with Mom. There were times, she says, when her desk drawer was difficult to pull open, so filled with guns was it.

Anyhow, you may wonder why I'm talking about all this here, the initial offering of a new column. Well, I wanted to talk about something important for openers, and almost all of this I never knew until a few days ago when my mother came to visit from Florida. I don't see much of her, and we've never really talked to each other; but she got onto the subject of my father, as she usually does, and I started prying the real truth out of her about him. Not the bulls.h.i.t they feed kids about their parents, but who he really was. In all of the things I've ever written, I've said virtually nothing about my father, you see, and that's because I simply didn't know the man. We were in the same house, but we were strangers. It was as though we vibrated on different planes of existence, pa.s.sing each other and pa.s.sing through each other, like shadows.

But when my mother got around to telling me my father had done time in prison, in some strange and perverted way I started to realize I'd been searching for "Doc" Ellison almost all my life.

Because of the stuff I'm not allowed to tell, he had to give up the D.D.S. practice. It was Prohibition time, it was Depression time, and my Dad had to support my mother and my sister and me. So he got into the selling of booze.

Most of this is unclear because my single source of information, my mother, chooses to blur it all. But as best I can tell, my Dad had friends in Canada, and he would make auto runs up through Buffalo into Toronto to pick up the hootch. Then he'd drive it back down to Cincinnati and Cleveland and thereabouts. After a while, things got easier, and my Dad gave work to a guy he met, a guy who was as down on his luck as Dad had been. And one night, on a run, the guy got busted while transporting the alcohol. So my Dad took the rap, and let the other guy get off. As my Mom tells it, the driver had a family and well...

My Dad was a gentle man.

So he went to the can. Fairly stiff sentence, from what I can gather, but he didn't do it all. (And years later, when I wound up in jail, I was always amazed at how facilitously and soberly my mother took it, and how competent she was at bailing my a.s.s out of the slammer. Now I understand.) After that, my Dad went to work for my uncles in Painesville, in their jewelry store. I was a little kid at the time, and knew none of what had gone down.

Years went by, and my Dad thought he owned a piece of the store-Hughes Jewelry on the comer of State & Main in Painesville. I was too busy fighting for my life to pay much attention, and I was always running away, but then in 1947, after my Uncle Morrie had come back from the War, it turned out my father didn't own anything. He had been the manager of the store, had built up the clientele and won friends all through town-he was the only Jew ever taken into the Moose lodge in Painesville, a town famed for its anti-Semitism-but when the crunch came down, my old man was out on his a.s.s. But it had been my mother's brothers, you see, and so there wasn't much he could do about it. Jewish families hang tight that way. So at close to the age of fifty, my father had to open his own store.

He couldn't get ground-floor s.p.a.ce on Main Street, so he took an upstairs suite, and sold from there. In his off-hours he sold appliances by personal contact. It was a grueling existence. The f.u.c.king climb up those stairs, alone, was murder. That staircase went almost straight up, and he had to make that climb twenty times a day.

Well, it killed him a year later.

May 1st, 1949, a Sunday, I came downstairs from my room, to see my Dad sitting in his big overstuffed chair by the fireplace, the Sunday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer around his feet, his pipe in his mouth. I was still on the stairs, about to ask him for the funnies when suddenly he began to choke.

I watched, helpless and with a kind of detached fascination as he died right before my eyes. Coronary thrombosis. It was allover in seconds. My mother got pretty well s.p.a.ced, and somehow we managed to get him onto the sofa, but the pulmotor squad arrived too late. They couldn't have done anything. He was gone the minute he started to choke.

All through the next days, I moved like some kind of somnambulist. I was into baseball in those days, and I had a fuzz-less tennis ball that I bounced against the house. For the next month all I did, from morning till night, was stand outside on the front lawn under the maple tree, and bounce that ball off the wall, and catch it in the trapper's mitt my Dad had bought me. I threw the ball and caught it, threw it and caught it, over and over and over...

It must have been h.e.l.l for everyone inside the house, the sound of that ball plonking against the wood, again and again, without end, till it got too dark to see it.

We moved away from there soon after, and I went from straight A's in school to failing grades in everything. I became a troubled kid of the worst sort. But it worked out.

Ever since then, I now realize, I've been looking for my father. I've tried to find him in Dad-surrogates, but that's always come to a bad end. And all I ever wanted to tell him was, "Hey, Dad, you'd be proud of me now; I turned out to be a good guy and what I do, I do well and...I love you and...why did you go away and leave me alone?"

When I lived in Cleveland, I used to go to his grave sometimes, but I stopped doing that more than forty years ago and haven't been back.

He isn't there.

My Mother On Sunday the 10th of October 1976, I committed the final outrage against my family; I spoke the eulogy at my mother's funeral. The family will never speak to me again. I can handle that.

When I say "my family," I mean, mostly, my mother's side, The Rosenthals. Who resemble, in more ways than the mind can readily support, the brutalizing members of the Sproul clan in Jerrold Mundis's current and brilliant novel, GERHARDT'S CHILDREN. They remind me of the first line from Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

And prime among that unhappy family's myths was the one that Harlan, Serita and Doc's kid, Beverly's brother, would wind up either dead or in an alley somewhere, having come to a useless end... or rotting away his old age in a Federal penitentiary. That I became a writer of some repute and became the first member of either the Rosenthal or the Ellison family to get listed in WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA, confounds them to this day; To them, I am like the snail known as the Chambered Nautilus, that has a sh.e.l.l with rooms in it. As the Nautilus lives its brief life it moves from room to room in its sh.e.l.l and finally emerges and dies; thus, it literally carries its past on its back. To the family, I am still a nine-year-old h.e.l.lion who took a hammer to Uncle Morrie's piano. (The fact that this never happened, that Morrie never owned a piano, does not in any way invalidate for them the apocryphal truth of the legend.) It is probably no different for anyone reading these words. All families form their opinions of the children early, and so we spend the rest of our lives in large part paying obeisance to shadows who neither care nor in fact have any power over our reality. It is thus for all of us, no matter how sophisticated and cut-loose we may be from the familial spiderweb.

To them, I am a nine-year-old Chambered Nautilus; even though I ran away from home at the age of thirteen, grew up, and have barely spoken a dozen words to my sister in the past thirty-eight years.

But there was still my mother, whom I supported in large part during the last years of her life, picking up the burden when I was financially able, from my Uncle Lew and my Uncle Morrie and from Beverly's husband, Jerold.

My mother had been terribly ill for many years. To my way of thinking, she wanted to die on May 1st, 1949, when my father had his coronary thrombosis and died in front of both of us. He was her life, her happier aspect, and she became-in any sensible not even exquisite sense-almost somnambulistic.

In August she had the latest of an uncountable number of strokes, followed it with a full-sized heart attack, and was taken into the Miami Heart Inst.i.tute. She knew the end was on her and she let me know that was the sum of it when we talked long distance.

She lay there getting worse and worse, and finally, forty-five days before the green blips went to a flat line on the monitor, she was down from one hundred and twenty pounds to forty-one pounds, her lungs were filled with fluid, her brain had swollen so her face was terribly twisted, her leg was filled with blood clots, her blood sugar had risen to an impossible level, she ran a temperature in excess of 102 constantly, she was blind, paralyzed, and no oxygen was going to the brain.

Blessedly, she was in deep coma.

She never recovered consciousness. They kept her on the IV and the monitoring for a month and a half. She was a vegetable and had she ever come out of it would have been an empty sh.e.l.l. I begged them to pull the plug, but they wouldn't.

The greatest fear my mother ever had was that some day she would wind up in a nursing home. She thought of them as h.e.l.lholes, as repositories for discarded loved ones, as the very apotheosis of rejection. She begged us never to put her there.

Shortly before she died, the Miami Heart Inst.i.tute held one of their "status meetings" and decided she was " stable," that is, she needed custodial care. And so they wanted her out. They suggested we get her booked into an old folks' home. They used another phrase. They always do. But it was a h.e.l.lhole, an old folks' home.

Beverly, my sister, who had gone through the anguish of the last six weeks down there, was forced reluctantly to find such a place. On Friday, October 8th, 1976, the day my mother was to be removed from Miami Heart and carted by ambulance to the h.e.l.lhole, though she was in deep coma and could not possibly have known what was intended for her dead but still-breathing husk, she chose to expire at 5:15 AM.

In some arcane way, I'm sure she knew.

When my brother-in-law Jerold called to tell me Beverly had just advised him of Mom's death, he asked if there were any arrangements I particularly wanted.

"Only two," I said. "Closed casket, and I want to read the eulogy." From that moment till Sunday at the funeral services, my family trembled in fear of what I would say. They knew I was no great lover of the clan, and they were terrified I would make a scene, depart from protocol in a way that would humiliate them in front of friends and relatives. They gave very little thought to my feelings about my mother. But that's the way it always is, I'm sure, with all families, with all deaths.

I flew all night Sat.u.r.day and got into Cleveland (where my mother's body had been taken, so she could be buried beside my father) at 6:30 in the morning. I drove to Beverly and Jerold's house and when Jerold asked to see the eulogy I'd written, which was almost the first thing he said to me, thus indicating the obsessiveness of their concern about "crazy" Harlan and what he might do, I lied and said I hadn't written anything, that it was to be extemporaneous, from the heart.

The relatives began arriving, and with the exception of my Uncle Lew, who has always been the coolest and the most understanding of the clan, they all circled me warily as if I were a jackal that might at any moment leap for their throats.

At the funeral home, Rabbi Rosenthal seemed equally uneasy about my partic.i.p.ation in the ceremonies. It was Succoth, the Jewish harvest holiday, and just a week after Yom Kippur, the holiest of the holies. Thus, certain prayers that are usually spoken at funeral services could not be spoken; alternate words were permissible, but few, so very few.

Rabbi Rosenthal is no relation to my family. His name and my mother's maiden name being Rosenthal is just coincidence. Like Smith. Or Jones. Or Hayakawa. Or Goetz. Or Piazza. He's a fine man, the Rabbi Emeritus of Cleveland Jewry, a strong and familiar voice in Cleveland Heights and environs. He has been for many years. But he didn't know my mother.

My family felt themselves honored to have pulled off the coup of Rabbi Rosenthal attending to the services. My family thinks in those terms: what looks good...social coups...fine form and attention to protocol. As you may have gathered, I am not concerned with shadow, merely reality.

Nonetheless, he advised me he would speak the opening words and then would call on me.

Before the main room with the pink anodized aluminum casket was opened to the attendees, the immediate family mourners and their spouses and children and grandchildren were taken to a family sitting room to the right of the main chamber. Jane Bubis, Beverly's best friend, bustled around. Morrie met old chums from Cleveland. My nephew Loren and I insisted on seeing Mom. Everyone told us not to look, that she had withered terribly, that we should "remember her as she had been." They always tell you to "remember" someone as "they were." Bear that phrase in mind. The nature of the outrage I committed against my family is contained in my pursuit of that admonition.

Loren and I insisted.

It didn't look like my mother. It was a cleverly constructed mannequin intended for some minor wax museum in an amus.e.m.e.nt park. The embalmers and cosmeticians had done as good a job as could be done, I'm sure; but it wasn't my Mom. She was already gone. This was a stranger. But I cried. Pain that clotted my chest and made me gasp for breath. But it wasn't my Mom.

The service began, and when Rabbi Rosenthal called on me, I walked up to the lectern, foolishly trailing my hand across the casket to establish some last rapport with her.

I pulled the pages I'd written from my inside jacket pocket and though there was no appreciable movement in the people sitting in front of me in the main chamber, the agitation I caught with peripheral vision, from the family seated in the side viewing room, was considerable: the frenzied trembling of small fish perceiving a predator in their pool.

Understand something: my sister and I have never been friends. Eight years older than I, she was always distressed at who I was, what I was, what I did. (I have long harbored the fantasy that I was actually a gypsy baby, stolen from the Romany caravan by an attacking horde of Jewish ladies with shopping bags.) Beverly is no doubt an estimable human being, filled to the br.i.m.m.i.n.g with love and charity and compa.s.sion. I have never been able to discern these qualities in her, but she has many loyal friends and if an election were to be held among the relatives, as to which of us could safely be taken into polite society of an evening without worry about a " scene," my sister Beverly would win in a walk. Though they take a (to me) somewhat hypocritical pride in my achievements and the low level of fame I've achieved for the Ellison family, it is a public pride, not to be confused with actually having to get near me. I can handle that, too.

As I began to read, my sister began to fall apart. I'm not sure if it was the " inappropriateness" (to her mind) of what I was saying, or the fact that I was crying and having difficulty reading the words, or that the torture she had undergone for six weeks had finally broken her, but she began writhing in Jerold' s grasp, and in a voice that could be heard throughout the funeral home hoa.r.s.ely cried for Jerold to "make him stop, make him stop! Stop him!" Beside her, her daughter Lisa, my niece, snarled, "Shut up, Mother!" but Beverly never heard her. She was manipulating her environment, and her lunatic brother Harlan was doing another of his disgusting numbers, desecrating the funeral of her mother. They finally manhandled her into another room, where her cries could still be heard. And I went on, with difficulty. And this is what I said: My mother died three days ago. Her name was Serita R. Ellison. The R stood for Rosenthal, her maiden name. I'll tell you everything I know about her.

My mother told me only one joke in her entire life. She probably knew a lot of others, but she never told them to me. I'll tell you the one she told me.

It's about these two Jewish fellows who meet on a street in Buffalo, New York. They are related, see, but not close; something like in-laws once removed. And Herschel doesn't care much for Solly, because Solly is always trying to sell him some crazy thing or get him involved in some shtumie business deal. But Herschel gets trapped coming out of the butcher shop and Solly says to him, "Have I got a deal for you!" And Herschel says, "If it's as good as that last deal, this time we'll go to the bankruptcy court hand-in-hand."

And Solly says, "Listen, you can't pa.s.s this one up. It's terrific! A friend of mine is having an affair with a woman whose second husband's brother is married to a girl whose father is in business with a guy whose son is a merchandising agent for circuses, and I can get for you, for a mere three thousand dollars, a guaranteed fully-grown, two ton Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey elephant."

So Herschel looks at him like he's sprouted another head, and he says, "You know, you've gotta be out of your mind. I live in a fifth floor walkup apartment with a wife and four kids, and one of them is sleeping in the sink we got so little room. What the h.e.l.l am I gonna do with an elephant, you dummy?"

And Solly says, "Listen, only because you're married to Gert, I'm gonna make this a special. You can have the elephant for two thousand five hundred. "

Herschel starts screaming. "Listen you yotz, what is it with you, are you deaf or something. I'm telling you I don't want, I don't need, I have no use for a two ton elephant, not for twenty-five hundred, not for nothing. How the h.e.l.l am I supposed to get the thing up the stairs? What do I feed it? You could die just from the body heat of a thing like that in a four-room apartment. Get away from me, you moron!"

And they argue back and forth, with Solly constantly reducing the price, till finally he says, as a last resort, "Okay, okay, you momser! You want to bleed me, a relative, you got no heart? Okay! My last and final offer. For you...not one...but two! Two two ton Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey elephants for five hundred dollars!"

And Herschel says, real quick, "Now you're talking business!"

When Momma told me that joke she was laughing. She laughed very long and very hard, and I did, too. Not because the joke was so funny, although it's not bad and she told it well, but because she was laughing. I never saw my mother laugh very much.

From May of 1949 on, I never saw her laugh at all.

That was when my father died.

It's impossible to talk about Serita without talking about Doc. Of course I never knew them when they were young and running around the way young people do, but from what I'm told by members of the Rosenthal family, they were some kind of short, Jewish equivalent of Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. They were in love, and they were nuts together.

When my father died, I think my mother's life stopped. It was twenty-seven years of shadows for her. Just marking time. Waiting to join Doc. If there's anything good about death, and anything that even remotely lightens the pain of my mother's death, it is that finally, after twenty-seven years, she came up lucky and went to meet my dad, to take up where they got cut off in 1949.

I'd tell you how old my mother was when she died, but as anyone who knew her for more than an hour can tell you, she would rather have had bamboo shoots thrust under her fingernails than reveal her age. She was like that.

She was a good woman, and a decent woman, and had all the right instincts about life, all the usual things people say at funerals; she was also opinionated, stubborn beyond belief, a frequent pain in the a.s.s, and capable of a dudgeon so high it would put the Queen Mother to shame. But G.o.d, how she worked for her kids. I don't remember a time when she wasn't working. Either beside my dad in the jewelry stores, or in the B'nai B'rith Thrift Shop, or somewhere. And no matter how much we took, she always came up with what we needed.

I remember once when I was a very little kid-and I was not the world's most tractable youngster-when I did something grotesque and awful; and Mom said, "You're going to get it when your father comes home." No doubt I deserved it. I usually did. And when my dad got back from work, exhausted and anxious simply to sit down and relax, Mom told him what I'd done and that I needed a good strapping.

Now understand: my family wasn't that big on corporal punishment. But my dad took me down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of our house on Harmon Drive in Painesville, and he took off his belt and he did a good job on me.

After a while, I came upstairs, and Mom and Dad were nowhere to be seen. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and through the closed door of their bedroom I could hear my dad crying. The licking had devastated him much more than it had me. And my mom was crying, too. She was consoling him, telling him it was the only thing he could do, and together they were solacing each other.

The Rosenthals were a family with a capacity for unhappiness that was awesome to behold, and Mom was a Rosenthal to her shoetops. There was the endless ganging-up of brothers and sisters in ever-changing permutations of the familial equation, with my mom sometimes allied with Alice and Lew against Morrie, and sometimes a.s.sociated with Morrie and Dorothy against Martin, and sometimes the hookups were so Machiavellian it was impossible to tell who was mad at whom. But throughout, no matter how affronted she thought she should be, my mother was a Rosenthal, who would take fire and axe to anyone who tried to harm one hair on the head of her kind. The Russian soul of the Rosenthals, which was so intimately a part of my mother's makeup, kept her from tasting unlimited joy in her later years- my niece Lisa was the great exception-they were in no way like grandchild and grandmother: they were best friends, chums, and the love between them so enriched both their lives that I think Mom's death is more crushing for Lisa than for any of us-but even so my mother managed to see Beverly well-married and the mother of two good kids, and me safely beyond any possibility of spending my life in jail. She took that to be treasure indeed.

I wish I could tell you more about Serita Ellison, but the sad, sorry fact is that we lived our lives as shadows to one another. We never really understood each other; the dreams never realized, the hopes set aside, the hungers that made us alien to one another. And so at final moments, as I speak of her, I try to hold the important memories; and the one that is richest, most recent is the picture of her in New Haven, Connecticut, in February of last year. I was invited to speak at the Yale Political Union, at Yale University, and I brought Mom up for the prestigious event. She was like a twenty-year-old girl. She was, as she used to put it, "in Seventh Heaven." Her kid was lecturing at Yale! How she did kvell! What naches! Radiant, like all the suns of the universe. It was snowing so hard in New Haven, and the drifts were so deep, and it was so bitterly cold, I was terrified that a woman in her condition would suffer damage. But she strode around like a cossack, I had to run to keep up with her.

And at my lecture, when I introduced her, she stood up and nodded so regally to all the Yalies that I thought I'd burst from pleasure. And when they brought over my books for her to autograph, she wrote, "Thank you for liking my son's books. "

Near the end, when she was clearly in pain and knew she was going away, we talked several times a day long distance, and I kept saying, "I'll come down there." And she kept saying, "No, I don't want you to see me like this. Beverly and Lisa are here, and I'm all right." She was more lucid than she'd been in years; I guess she knew it was all over; and she said to me during what I guess was the last time we talked, though it might not have been the last time, "You turned out all right and I love you. "

And now she's gone, and there's nothing much to say about the death of an old woman, any old woman, except that she's dead and everyone who knew her now has a finite number of days and nights to lament never having said all the things that should have been said.

She was my mother, and I miss her.

By the time I stepped off the platform and returned to the family room at the side of the main chamber, Beverly had been returned to her seat. I'm not sure she even heard the eulogy beyond the telling of the "joke." After the ceremony was completed-so briefly, so awfully briefly-no one would speak to me. No one came up and said, "That was beautiful, what you said about your mother." My nephew Loren shook my hand and we hugged, because he was crying, too, and he said, very softly, "You did good." Much later, Jerold took me aside and said, "Serita would have been proud of you." But other than those two remarks, I was shunned. Beverly, the uncles and aunts, they didn't stone me, but they made sure they didn't even brush my shoulder. One holds oneself aloof from pariahs and other uncleans. And their outrage frees me of them forever.

My mother is gone, and I did what I wanted to do for her; she always enjoyed listening to me read, so I did it one last time for her. I know d.a.m.ned well she never heard it, but it's an innocent conceit. And they wanted to put her down too quickly, with too few words being spoken. I would have read my eulogy and then asked Beverly and Lisa and Lew and anyone else who had something to say, to come up and say it. She deserved that much at least.

Eulogies are never for the dead. They are always for the living; to pay off debts; to say goodbye formally one last time. But no one should be sent down into darkness with too few words.

Tired Old Man (An Hommage to Cornell Woolrich) The h.e.l.l of it is, you're never as tough as you think you are. There's always somebody with sad eyes who'll shoot you down when you're not even looking, when you're combing your hair, tying your shoelace. Down you go, like a wounded rhino, nowhere near as tough as you thought.

I came in from the Coast on a Wednesday, got myself locked up in the Warwick to finish the book, did it, called the messenger and had him take the ma.n.u.script over to Wyeth the following Tuesday, and I was free. Only nine months late, but it was an okay piece of work. It was going to be at least three days till I got the call telling me what alterations he wanted-there were three chapters dead in the middle I knew he'd balk at-I'd cheated on the psychiatric rationale for the brother-in-law's actions, had held back some stuff I knew Wyeth would demand I flesh out-and so I had time to kill.

I've got to remember to remind myself: if I ever use that phrase again, may my carbons always be reversed. Time to kill. Yeah, just the phrase.

I called Bob Catlett, thinking we'd get together for dinner with his wife, the psychiatrist, if he was still seeing her. He said we could set it up for that night and by the way, why didn't I come along for the monthly meeting of The Cerberus Club. I choked back a string of uglies. "I don't think so, man. They give me a pain in the a.s.s."

The Cerberus is a "writers' club" of old pros who've been around since Clarence Buddington Kelland was breaking in at Munsey's Cavalier. And what had been a fairly active group of working professionals in the Fifties and Sixties was now a gaggle of burnt-out cases and gossips, drinking too much and lamenting the pa.s.sing of Ben Hibbs at the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. I was thirty years past that time, a young punk by their lights, and I saw no merit whatsoever in spending an evening up to my hips in dull chatter and weariness, gagging on cigarette smoke and listening to septuageneric penny-a-word losers comparing the merits of Black Mask to those of Weird Tales.