"Sorry I'm late, dad. Merry Christmas."
"I hear Stennis is in trouble," he said. "I never liked that son of a bitch. How much does he make? Squatez-vous, kid. We can have only one drink. I've got a two o'clock client meeting."
"I didn't know you knew Stennis."
"We're agency-of-record for the mental illness series everybody's talking about. Stennis told us the ten-second spots we've been running are in bad taste considering the subject matter of the program. He said the network has been getting complaints. You know what I'm talking about, the animated jingles. We'll have two dry martinis on the rocks, waiter. Then wait ten minutes and bring us the boeuf Bourguignon. We won't have time for dessert or coffee."
"What are your plans for Christmas day?" I said. "I thought I might drive up to the house."
"Fine, sport, do that. Bring a girl along. We'll have a few drinks and drive up to the Admiral Benbow for some turkey. Your mother used to make a swell turkey. I should sell that house but I can't. How's Merry these days? I miss that girl. Damn sweet kid."
"She's fine, dad."
"Listen, I don't deny I've done some screwing around in my time. Man's not worth much if he doesn't get the urge now and then. But how can I marry some big-hipped peroxide bitch after all those years living with your mother? I married your mother when I was twenty-two years old. We lived in a cold-water flat on upper Broadway. When Mary was born I went out and got drunk. Forget the nostalgia. Those were rotten days, pally. Now I've reached the age when a man feels he has to make some kind of summing up. But screw golf. It's sure death for someone like me. Everybody wants me to go out and play golf with them. The last seven, eight years, since your mother's death, all I hear is golf. I work all weekend, either home or in the office. Work is better than death. Look, I've got a little thing going with my secretary. What good does it do? Can I depend on something like her for the long haul? I said on the rocks, waiter."
"How old is she?" I said.
"I don't know, about twenty-four. When you get to be my age, they all look the same. If you want to go out with her, I'll fix it up."
"What's she like?"
"She goes down," he whispered.
"That's not what I mean."
"You're trying to find out if she's suitable for me. That's all right. I don't mind. I respect your views, kid. But I'm the last of the old school in this business. I've got six account men and nine assistant account men working for me. Harvard Business School. I wouldn't give them the sweat off my balls if they needed it to press their pants. And I'll tell you something else. They respect me. And I'll tell you why. They respect me because they know I can do their jobs better than they can. You need a little color in this business. All the account guys in our shop look like laboratory specimens soaking in formaldehyde. If you know your job you can afford to be yourself, up to a point. I learned that many years ago. They put four of those ugly gray padded chairs in my office. I threw them out the window into an alley. You know how word travels on the Avenue. Inside a week I had six new job offers. Client thinks I'm the greatest thing ever came down the pike. We have lunch every Tuesday at the Yale Club. Hell of a nice guy. Prince among men. Played football and lacrosse in college. I sent him to my tailor."
"Here we are," I said. "Drink up. Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, Dave. God bless you."
My father collected reels of TV commercials. The basement of the house in Old Holly was full of these reels, carefully filed and cross-indexed as to length, type of product, audience recall, product identification and a number of other categories. The index cards filled two file cabinets and the reels themselves stood upright in hundreds of numbered slots in a series of floor-to-ceiling filmshelves which he had designed and built himself. The wine cellar, my mother used to call it. He had a screen and projector and he spent several nights a week viewing the commercials and making notes. He had been doing this for many years. He considered it part of his job. His purpose, he told the family, was to find the common threads and nuances of those commercials which had achieved high test ratings; to learn the relationship between certain kinds of commercials and their impact in the marketplace, as he called it. We spent many of our adolescent nights, Mary and Jane and I, sitting in that dark basement watching television commercials. We looked forward to seeing every new reel he brought home. While my mother wandered through the large old house, the rest of us slouched in the flickering basement and argued about which new commercial was best. My father used to arbitrate our bitter disputes. It doesn't matter how funny or pretty a commercial is, he used to say; if it doesn't move the merchandise off the shelves, it's not doing the job; it has to move the merch. And now, as the waiter put our plates before us, I thought of him standing by the projector as the first new reel of the evening thrust its image through the dust-drizzling church-light toward the screen, an alphabet boy eating freckled soup perhaps, a man carving his Thanksgiving teeth, the tongues of seven naked housewives lapping at a bowl of dog food. I wished he were dead. It was the first honest thought which had entered my mind all day. My freedom depended on his death.
"Why is it that all the advertising people I've ever known want to get out?" I said. "They all want to build their own schooners, plank by plank, and sail to the Tasman Sea. I know a copywriter at Creighton Insko Dale. At lunch one day he started to cry."
"I love the business," my father said. "It's dog eat dog. It's a crap game in an alley for six million bucks. Where else can a man like me make the kind of money I make? I have the right brand image. You know that as well as I do. Wall Street would kick me out on my ass. But at my age I don't worry about money anymore. I've been reading Tolstoy. Every man feels he has a novel in him. He feels he has a novel and a Eurasian mistress. Tolstoy makes me want to write a novel. Your mother was ill a good deal of the time but she had something these bitches today couldn't touch. My secretary? Maxine? She has soap under her fingernails. Seven out of eight times I look at her fingernails I see little slivers of soap.
Compare that with your mother. At my age you come to realize that you did everything wrong. No matter who you are, everything you did was wrong. Maybe I'll turn Catholic."
"I didn't know you were thinking along those lines."
"There's something there," he said to his elbow. "I've been doing a lot of reading. I was never much for religion but there's something there. You know the Catholic church in Old Holly, Sacred Bones or whatever it's called? I called up the head priest one night, the pastor, and we had an interesting talk. Hell of a nice guy. He knew who I was. He told me all about the human soul. The soul has a transcendental connection to the body. It informs the body. The soul becomes aware of its own essence after it separates from the body. Once you're dead, your soul can be directly illuminated by God. I sent him a case of Johnnie Walker Red."
"What time is it?" I said.
"Yeah, I have to get going. Listen, sport, see what you can find out about Stennis. Find out how much he makes."
It was snowing again and people moved head-down, clutching their hats, shouldering into the wind. I walked across the wide gray lobby. In a far corner there was an exhibit of prize-winning war photographs. One of them was an immense color blow-up, about ten feet high and twenty feet wide. In the center of the picture was a woman holding a dead child in her arms, and behind her and on either side were eight other children; some of them looked at the woman while others were smiling and waving, apparently at the camera. A young man was down on one knee in the middle of the lobby, photographing the photograph. I stood behind him for a moment and the effect was unforgettable. Time and distance were annihilated and it seemed that the children were smiling and waving at him. Such is the prestige of the camera, its almost religious authority, its hypnotic power to command reverence from subject and bystander alike, that I stood absolutely motionless until the young man snapped the picture. It was as though I feared that any small movement on my part might distract one of those bandaged children and possibly ruin the photograph.