“I’m tired, Mikey. Why are you carrying on like this?”
“And I suppose you didn’t? You made a scene! You made a son of a whore’s bitch of a scene. God damn it to pus shit. You made a scene!”
“Come on, now. Jesus. Get hold of yourself please. Here, take my handkerchief. Your nose is running.”
“Stick my nose. Stick your handkerchief.”
“Right.”
“You made a scene. I’ll say you did. I’ll say so. ‘Your pop’s dying, Mikey. I’ll miss you, Mikey. You’re the one. I love you, kid. You’re the one I love. I’m sorry I crapped out on you, son. You’re man of the house now; take care of your mother, Mikey. Study hard. Behave yourself. Don’t get into trouble. Promise, promise me now. Your dad’s dying, kiddo. He’s had a massive cardiac infarction and he’s slipping fast. Put your hand over my heart like you’d pledge allegiance to the flag.’ Jesus, Daddy, I wasn’t even ten years old.”
“He was crazy,” Druff said. “He had the bedside manner of an elephant. No idea how to talk to people.”
“And you did.”
“Did I say those things? I must have scared hell out of you. I’m sorry. I said all those things?”
“Oh Dad. Every word.”
“Well, how do you think I felt, he told me the shape I was in, that the first ten or so hours were critical and I might not last the night? How do you think I felt, he said it might do me good I set my house in order and told my loved ones good-bye?”
“And I did it. I pledged allegiance to your heart!”
“He was irresponsible. No, really. That was irresponsible. A bull-in- a-china-shop doctor. I was so scared, Mikey. More frightened than when I found out I had to go in for the open-heart surgery. Jeez, I can’t get over that guy. How can people talk that way? Doctors hold people’s lives in their hands. Don’t they realize the part the mind plays in healing the body? The brute force of attitude? He should have been brought up on charges, a guy like that.”
“And what about you? What about the way you talk to people?”
“I did love you, Mikey. I swear it. I meant every word.”
“Sure you did. I was cute. I was this cute fat kid.”
“I was barely thirty. He told me to set my house in order. I wasn’t that much older than you are now. I was too young to die.”
“You were saying these things and crying. Your nose was running. Under the oxygen mask. I didn’t know what to do. Why wouldn’t you let me ring for the nurse?”
“How many times do I have to tell you? I was setting my house in order!”
“Tit piss fart wind on your house!”
“What is that? What’s going on down there?” Rose Helen called. “Do you know what time it is? You woke me up.”
Druff and Mikey looked guiltily at each other.
“I bought new batteries for her today,” his son said.
“Yes,” Druff said, “I know. So did I.”
“She sleeps with them in?”
“She’s afraid the smoke alarms will go off and she won’t hear them if she doesn’t wear them.”
“Are you two fighting?”
“We were having a little argument. Sorry we woke you. It’s all over.”
“It isn’t,” Mikey said softly.
“It is for now,” Druff said as quietly. “I’m exhausted.”
“You look worn out,” his son said.
“I am. I’m beat,” said the City Commissioner of Streets. “I might be coming down with something. I didn’t eat. All the running around I’ve been doing.”
“What running around?”
“Well, Scouffas. McIlvoy. A lot of little shit.”
“Are you having any chest pains?”
“No no.”
“Because even if you’re not having any right now but only just feel they might be coming on, you should take your pills. There’s no need for you to wait. That’s what the doctor said.”
“No,” Druff said. “It’s not chest pain.”
“You were taking these short, shallow breaths.”
“Fuck my short, shallow breaths.”
Mikey smiled. “I was worried,” he said.
“You worry about the wrong things.”
“What is it?” Rose Helen said. “Aren’t you ever coming up?” She’d put on her robe and slippers and come downstairs.
“Dad’s exhausted. It’s an effort for him to move. He practically can’t put one foot in front of the other.”
“It’s not an effort for me to move. I can move. I can put one foot in front of the other.” He tried to push himself upright. He struggled to stand.
Rose Helen and Mikey stood at faltered Druff’s side.
It was an effort for him to move, but suddenly all three of them were in motion in the living room at the same time, in each other’s way. Rose Helen pushed in front of the City Commissioner of Streets while Mikey still stood at the coffee table in front of the couch where he’d offered Druff a hand up, and which Druff had refused. He was waiting until his father passed but Druff hesitated, uncertain of his son. It was one of those fits-and-starts things, some stalled comedy of errors in a doorway, on a sidewalk, in a street. Druff, wiped out, finally making the move, almost ran into his son.
He was so tired.
“I don’t know about you two,” Rose Helen said, “but I’m going to bed.”
Pulling on the staircase’s wooden handrail and leaning against the wall, he dragged himself up the steps, following her, leading Michael in the slow procession and watching for any depressions in the carpet as though they were tiny potholes that could trip him up. “Go ahead,” he told his son, waving him on, “pass me.”
He went into their bedroom where Rose Helen was already under the covers. Exhausted, wasted, he shuffled out of his clothes, let them fall to the floor. Awful, he thought, dreadful, awful what they had done out of boredom. Then he remembered. It was Druff, not Dan, who’d said there ought to be something malevolent, something personal. So he posed a question. If MacGuffin was the principle of structure to Druff, of pattern and shading, and all the latent architecture of the old man’s life, what was Druff to MacGuffin? Why, raw material. Like pitch, like tar, like clay or sand or silica, like gravel and the trace elements of all the asphalts.
Then, hoping not to sleep, not daring to dream, he got into their bed.
A Biography of Stanley Elkin
Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.
Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.
Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.