“So…” I said, when she was through, “are you thinking you’re going to be there, maybe?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “No, I have obligations with other clients this weekend.”
“Oh.”
“Look,” she said breezily, “I want to apologize about last weekend. That was terribly inappropriate. I hope we can put it behind us, you know, and work together civilly.”
“You make it sound like we were in a fist fight,” I said.
“You could say that.” A long pause while that sunk in. “Look, Tim, I think that with us both coming off bad relationships and all, the last thing we need is a…a thing, clogging up the gears.” Her voice was sick with the confrontation, however minor. “Don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“So you’re on a panel Sunday. ‘Taking Over the Old Strips.’ It’s at eleven in the morning, and they said you’d find the room on the general schedule…”
“A panel? What do I do on a panel?”
“I dunno. You sit and talk with other cartoonists in front of a bunch of people, I suppose.”
“Ah.”
“Well…”
I felt the call slipping away from me — had I had a grip on it to begin with? — and said quickly, “So, do you have time for lunch? In New York?”
A sigh. “I really can’t today, Tim, I’m sorry.”
I imagined myself as a kind of Promethean figure, doomed to sit on a high peak, enduring brusque phone calls from women I have offended, every day for eternity. My crime? Bringing bathos to the mortals. “Okay,” I said, taking my medicine with a whimper.
* * *
Working in the evening, I heard a car pull up into the driveway, and its door open and close. I peeked out and saw the back half of a big, brown, unfamiliar sedan. Then I heard Pierce’s voice, the sound of the screen door, and silence.
Dorn had made me paranoid. I was dying to know who had come. On the other hand I didn’t want Pierce thinking I was spying. I decided to wait it out and spy later, when the visitor was leaving.
I was drafting a word-mispronunciation gag. Lindy was sitting on the floor among some messily stacked books, and Timmy was standing nearby, talking to someone outside the panel (another common weirdness of FF Wurster and I had isolated during the week). Timmy was pointing to Lindy and saying, “Bobby likes strawberries and Bitty likes blueberries, but Lindy likes liberries!”
The crisp, inarguable stupidity of this delighted me. Certainly it could pass as an original FF strip, and I figured that, if I got it right, it would be included in the final packet I submitted to the syndicate. I might even bring it to Ray Burn, if Susan still felt like setting up a meeting between us. I did several pencil roughs of the cartoon, which differed mostly in terms of placement: should Lindy be sitting on a couch or chair, or should I stick with the floor? Should Timmy be in the foreground, thus larger than Lindy, or at the same depth? I tried all the combinations, and found that Lindy on the floor, Timmy in the foreground worked best. I sketched this out three or four times, doing my best to make Timmy simply look closer, instead of unusually large. One of them looked okay, though it took me a while to figure out why: a stray line coming off Lindy’s hair seemed to form a vague corner in the room, implying spatial depth. I filled in the rest of this line and added converging floor lines, and suddenly the perspective all made sense. Excited, I got out the thick paper and Wolff B. Then there was a knock on the door.
I jumped, bashing both knees against the underside of the desk. “Come in.”
The door opened and in walked Uncle Mal. He was dressed, incongruously, in a pair of cutoff jeans and a loose, short-sleeved button-down shirt, and his sham black hair was mussed on the left, possibly from driving with the window open. His goofball smile was the most honest thing I’d seen all week. “I thought I’d come out and check on you,” he said. “I’ve visited half your family today.”
“No kidding,” I said, rubbing my knees. They were throbbing so powerfully I thought I could hear them making a sound, a low electric hum.
“Your mom today, your brother just now. Your father’s grave.”
“You picked the toughies, didn’t you?”
“You’re no exception, it seems.” His hands clasped each other behind his back, and he looked around the studio, nodding.
“How’s Mom?”
He didn’t look at me when he said, “Absent, mostly. Barely your mother anymore.”
“I know,” I said. “We took her on a picnic…”
“She remembered. It was all she talked about. She couldn’t recall who took her, though. I thought it might be you two.” He gave his head a quick shake, the way a dog does brushing off flies, then met my eyes. “So!” he said. “How’s the inheritance?”
“Not so bad.” I handed him the preliminary sketch. “This is the first official attempt at a cartoon.”
He glanced at it a second, then laughed out loud. “Funny.”
“You think?”
“Oh, yes. A good likeness, too, of your father’s work. Your little pants are quite skillful.” He handed the drawing back.
“I appreciate that,” I said.
He spent a few seconds idly nodding. He had something to say, it appeared, but couldn’t get it out. I decided to throw him a bone. “Hey,” I said, “can I ask you about a legal matter?”
His face relaxed. “Sure.”
I told him about Ken Dorn, about the merchandising situation with Burn Features. He nodded slowly, seriously as I talked, appearing to relish the gradual unveiling of the problem. For once I could see the appeal of attorneyhood. Problems, all problems, could be applied to an established set of rules for judgment, and solved. The answer to any dispute was there, in the books, waiting to be discovered and applied. He took a deep breath.
“Well, if money was the only consideration here, they’d go with the other guy.”
“Oh,” I said, crushed at having my own thoughts so succinctly voiced.
“On the other hand, you’d be surprised at how often money isn’t the point.” He raised a single eyebrow. “Are you going to talk to this Burn guy?”
“Apparently.”
“Well, there you go,” he said. “Sell yourself.” He smiled a little. “If that’s not too, uh, distasteful to you, of course.”
I shrugged. “I’m accustomed to the distasteful.”
He chuckled, then leveled, out of nowhere, a serious gaze at me. A little of the nervousness had returned, and he wiped his face with a pale hand. “So are you learning anything about your father?” He nodded toward the drawings.
“A little of this, a little of that.”
“Ah! Good, good. He wasn’t all bad, you know.”
“I never said he was.”
At this his face flushed, and I regretted saying it. “Ah, no, of course not,” he muttered, backing toward the door.
“Say, Mal, I didn’t mean to—”
“No, no, I’m prying in your work.” He opened the door. “I just want to see how you’re doing, is all. I…I miss you kids. Sometimes I wish…”
“What?” I said at last, when he had long trailed off into silence.
He jerked out of it, looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “I wish you’d all been little at once, like in the strip. That would have been…a lot of fun.”
Poor Mal, I thought: never married, a lover of children, left with such a rotten family to play surrogate parent to. Maybe he was right; maybe it would have been fun. Somewhere in the studio there was a promotional drawing my father occasionally sent to fans, of all six of us crammed into the station wagon beneath the weight of our dozen teetering suitcases lashed to the roof rack, waving toward the frame, as if the viewer were our best friend in the world. It was easy to contrast this with our actual vacations. I recalled a final one, a last gasp effort to a secluded lake in the Adirondacks: Rose was absent, having long since moved out, and Bobby, who had just learned to drive, insisted on taking his own car. It rained, our food was absconded with by forest animals, and Pierce, unable to sleep, flung rocks into the water all night long, keeping us up with the splashing. We left in waves: Bitty got sick the third day, and Bobby drove her and Mom back home. None of them returned. Pierce and Dad and I remained, locked in a proud silence, for the rest of the week, subsisting on mouse-gnawed junk food from a nearby convenience store housed in a tarpaper shack.