Always exaggerated in life, approaching death Barney Resnick was a swollen grotesquerie. The old man was dying as a star dies, exploding in one last, vast outpouring of energy, expanding exponentially in volume and radiating heat and light far into the universe. The cosmic rays emitted by the old man's detonation showered on us all, slicing through emotional time and space and distance, driving radiation counters frantic, waking us in the night with attacks of anxiety, muttered curses, damaged and mutated genes. When he was gone, he threatened, there would be nothing to replace him. All light, all heat, all radiance would die with him, sucked inward after his collapsing magnificence. He would be the black hole in our future universe.

Barney would like the comparisons, for he thought of himself as a force of nature. By his own account, by the family legend he had helped to create, he was the fiery core of his own particular universe and those of us who orbited round his malevolence were held in place by guilt and greed, trapped in the magnetic field of his wealth.

The metaphor will not hold, it is distended and collapses of its own weight. That is the effect Barney has on me, on everyone around him, he forces us to exaggerate. There is a bloated, unhealthy quality to the stories about him as if the tellers of the tale have stretched and deformed themselves to match the subject, like a snake that dislocates its jaw to swallow a prey larger than its own head.

The telephone rang in the middle of the night, in the small hours when one awakes, confused, the mind still caught in the gauzy wrap of dreams, bewildered and searching all at once for the offending alarm buzzer, the light, the crying child. It was Barney's favorite time to call.

As I paused, dim-witted, staring at the phone and

wondering why it made that noise and where I was and when it was, my wife jerked upright beside me. Without looking I could tell she had her hand to her breast in anticipation of horror. Elaine lived in a world of dire premonition, like a vulnerable animal attuned by instinct to cringe at shadows and footsteps.

If I walked suddenly into a room-even though I had been in the room just moments before-she would give a startled gasp,

then look at me with a hurt expression as if I had leaped out yelling Boo! Loud noises made her jump and grab at her heart. She was like a rabbit in the woods, like a deer, and Barney

knew how best to scare her.

"It's him," she said. There was no trace of drowsiness in

her voice, and I wondered if she had been lying awake for hours again. I feared that she might have inherited Barney's insomnia.

It wasn't him. It was her; but still, no surprise.

Barney had taken of late to using Doris as his proxy, administering his little tortures by third person as if he couldn't be bothered to do it himself. Pain delivered with disdain, insult ladled on to injury.

Doris was Barney's fourth wife-or fifth, if you counted the one who lasted all of a week before she tried to shoot him. Either because of the ephemeral nature of her connubial visit or the firepower of her self-expression--the Resnicks expected litigation on parting company, not ventilation--the family did not regard Marjorie as the genuine article. Any mention of her name in the litany of wives would elicit a Resnik shrug and a puff of dismissal, as if she amounted to no more than a gust of bad air. "Oh, that one," they would say before continuing on to more important matters, rather as if they had omitted the stunted term of Gerald Ford when discussing 20^th century presidents.

The headboard of the marriage bed in one of Barney's houses still displayed the bullet hole where Marjorie had delivered her opinion of matrimony. Someone had stuffed it with the filter tip of a cigarette, thus stating the indifference with which the whole affair, both marriage and attempted homicide, were viewed.

Marjorie had replaced the primary wife, Mary Lou the child-bearer and in turn had been supplanted by Rachel, the slut, then Susan, the saint. Doris was the clean-up squad, called in to supervise the dying and reap the harvest. Or so I had assumed. But if she were to inherit the widow's share of the fortune she was also paying a price for it. Barney was not dying nearly as fast as he was supposed to.

"Hi, Doll."

Her voice was raspy from a lifetime of smoking and there was no affection in the term. She called everyone "doll" or "sweetheart" with the same condescension she used in addressing her servants. Like most of the Resnicks, she never identified herself but assumed her voice would be recognized. Gallingly, she was right.

"She's right here," I said and handed the phone to Elaine. Doris and I had honed our conversations to the minimum. Since Elaine would take the phone eventually and demand that everything be repeated, I had eliminated myself as the middleman as much as possible, which suited my temperament perfectly. I wanted to know everything the Resnicks did, every nuance, every detail, every sordid scrap because they fascinated me; but like a spectator on the edge of a cockfight I wanted to watch, not to be involved. I occasionally felt when probing Elaine for the last crumb of gossip much as I did watching a surgical documentary on television; I wanted to see what was happening, but at the same time I was so repelled by the blood and trauma that I could scarcely make myself look. I had married into an engrossing and grisly spectator sport.

"Is he all right?" Elaine asked of Doris. Her brow was wrinkled and her jaw tensed, like a fighter anticipating a blow. I massaged her neck but I doubt that she even felt my hand.

"He's back in the hospital." Elaine held the phone an inch or two from her ear so I could hear, and Doris' rasp filled the darkness. It was uncomfortably like having her with us in the bedroom.

"How bad is it this time?"

"I don't think it's too bad. He had some pains and Irving thought they should take some tests." Irving was Dr. Fine, the physician the family wore round their neck like a sign of the zodiac or a golden chain. Irving was invoked rather than consulted.

"Ask when he went in," I whispered.

"Is it his heart?" she asked.

"The heart--and some other things. Don't worry, Doll."

"Why is she calling at 3 in the morning if we're not supposed to worry?" I asked. "We could not worry just as well around noon."

"What other things?" Elaine asked.

There was a pause. I could almost smell the smoke as Doris exhaled into the mouthpiece.

"He was feeling a little funny. Those headaches, you know. Of course, he hasn't been sleeping, but now when he does get to sleep he has these nightmares. You know."

"I didn't know he was having nightmares," Elaine said.

"Oh. sure." Another pause. Doris' speech was punctuated with these caesuras every thirty seconds or so. Her involvement with her cigarette was too intense to allow her to speak at the same time as she smoked.

"They're very frightening."

"What are they about?" I asked. I couldn't imagine what might frighten Barney.

"He doesn't like to talk about them, but he has them all the time now," said Doris. "Irving thought they ought to do a few tests." Barney had undergone as many tests in the last few years as a new drug trying to pass FDA scrutiny. As far as I knew, he

had failed them all; Barney had everything wrong with him. Irving's job had become less one of diagnosis than cataloguing.

"When did he check into the hospital?" I asked again. I gripped Ellen's arm to get her attention. "Ask when he checked in."

She looked at me for a moment as if I were a stranger telling her I wanted to use the phone. It was the way I always felt when she was dealing with her father.

"When did he go to the hospital?" she asked at last.

"Just after dinner," Doris said. "He wasn't feeling well enough to eat."

I looked at the glowing digits of the clock and lifted a hand in exasperation. The call had come eight or nine hours later, how much of an emergency could it be? Elaine did not see me and would not have understood if she had--she was thinking of Barney, not Barney's maneuvers. He was performing another of his spiteful conjuring tricks, pulling dread and anxiety and guilt out of empty night and Elaine beheld his act with awe and wonder, the perfect child-like audience, while I skeptically watched him work, keeping my eye on the hand that slipped into his jacket for a fresh load of turmoil. I had to respect his technical mastery even while I loathed the result. But then my opinion didn't matter, I was not his audience. His daughter looked on, rapt, just as duped and manipulated as she had been for forty years.

"Did he ask you to call me?" It was the inevitable question. She knew the answer but could not help asking. I put my arm around her shoulders in anticipation of the comfort she would need. "Did he want to talk to me?"

"No, Doll. He called me a few minutes ago. I'd been there in the hospital until two, you know. I finally walk in the door at home and there he is on the phone. Some silly question. Did I remember to send a check to Wally, some cockamamy thing like that as if it couldn't wait until morning. It was just his way of saying goodnight, you know what he's like."

Unfortunately Elaine did not know what he was like, which

was why he could still hurt her. I sometimes think it was her continued innocence that drove him to mistreat her, as if anyone who loved him that much deserved whatever he gave her. I was glad it was still dark in the room so I couldn't see the tears in her eyes. They would madden me as much as they moved me.

"I just thought you kids ought to know," Doris continued, "Richie is going to the hospital in the morning."

Which meant Richie had been called first. Another insult, another pain. I squeezed her shoulders, stroked her hair even though I knew my comforts did not register.

"How are you doing, Sweetie?" Elaine asked. "Are you holding up all right?" The compassion was genuine, to my persistent amazement. My lovely wife, my darling, vulnerable, oft-injured wife continued to accept everyone in the role which they had selected for themselves. Doris was not the torturer's accomplice, sharpening the weapons in the dark of night, as I saw her, but the anxious spouse, frightened and alone, reaching out for comfort to her family, to the son and daughter who loved the dying man as much as she did. The rope in her extended hand was not the garrotte, as it seemed to me, but the tie that binds.

"Oh. and Hunter ... Is Hunter still there, hon?"

"I'm here," I said into the mouthpiece.

"He particularly wanted to be remembered to you."

It was such an uncharacteristic phrasing for her that I knew she had rehearsed it.

"He what?"

"He said next time I spoke to you kids I had to remember to say hello to you."

"You mean to us," I said.

"Well, of course, to both of you, but especially to you," she insisted.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"I don't know, Doll. I guess it means he's thinking about you."

Elaine slid out from under my arm. I had just been used to administer another lash. Doris aspirated smoke into the earpiece as my wife got out of bed and moved to the bathroom in the dark.

"Since when does he think about me?"

"He thinks about you a lot. He just doesn't say anything. That's his way, you know."

It was like hearing that Richard III was contemplating my future. Not a particularly comforting feeling.

Left alone with Doll, the conversation was at an end. We both got off as quickly as we could.

"What do you suppose that meant?" I asked Elaine.

The bathroom light came on with painful suddenness.

"Does it have to mean anything? It's just his way of saying hello."

"Nothing filters through to us that isn't as calculated as a semaphore," I said. "He has never yet said hello to me when you didn't remind him. Why now?"

"We'll have to go," she said. She stepped into the bathroom doorway, the light behind her. The water could be heard running in the sink. She had washed her face, removing the traces of the tears. My own Lady of the Sorrows, racked by her love for a

filicidal father, shackled to a husband who saw her suffering and terror and could not quell them. So much hurt encompassed by such a lovely shell.

"We don't have to go," I argued, knowing the futility of the argument.

"I think this may be it."

"You've thought that a half dozen times in the past year. He treats that hospital like it's a spa. I think he does it to get away from Doris for a few hours."

"There was something in her voice this time," she said. "She didn't want to say, but I could tell she wanted me to know this was special."

"Shall I call her a back and ask for a clarification? Was she implying yes when she said no?"

I argued on for a few moments, trying to allay her fears by ridiculing them. It was not what she needed but we had been married far too long to give each other what we needed. By now we just gave each other what we could.

"Make him call you. Make him ask you for once," I said. "If it's important enough for us to go, it's important enough for him to say so."

"You don't have to go," she said.

"Don't you want me to go?"

"I want you to please yourself. I know how much my family upsets you."

She had put on her robe, the prelude to a night spent in the darkened kitchen in hours of silent brooding, her sole light the glow of a cigarette. She smoked only during her funks and kept a secret stash of cigarettes somewhere in the house. For months I had tried to help her out of these moods, but she clung to them, wrapped them tightly around her, as if she preferred the unhappiness in which she draped herself to the random miseries that would be inflicted upon her by others. From the top of the stairs where I would take up my own silent vigil, I could see her cigarette ember reflected in the black glass of the kitchen window and hear each breath like a world-weary sigh. I would try to monitor her from afar by the sounds of footsteps or scraping chairs. If there was movement, there was hope. At the nadir of her plunge into despair, she sat as still as a grave stone. When she was in this mood it was like having a ghost in the house that wanted nothing more than to be left alone to haunt itself.

"Your family don't upset me," I said, hoping to keep her engaged. "They bewilder me, they perplex me, they astound me."

"You don't approve of them."

"I don't approve of much. That's just my style. But of course I'll go with you if you're going. Come to bed."

"I'm not tired. I think I'll go downstairs for awhile. You go back to sleep."

"I don't mean to sleep. Come to bed," I said. "Come to me." I held out my arms. She hesitated and I could feel the bonds of her depression tugging her away. I got out of bed and took her hands.

"Come," I said. In the light from the bathroom she looked pale and ethereal, as if she really were a spirit after all. A wraith of sadness who came to me sometimes in the flesh, but only on a visit, only on loan. I kissed her lips and they were as dry as sex without desire.

"You don't have to," she said.

"I want to. I want to love you." Our marriage was new enough that sex still seemed the solution to any problem.

"I mean you don't have to go home with me."

"This is your home," I said. "We live here. Our home is here."

"I didn't mean that," she said. "You know what I meant."

"You mean your home is with your father."

"Don't attack me now, not tonight."

"I wasn't attacking. I was just saying..." I had removed her bathrobe and pulled her down to the bed. Now she got up and retrieved the robe.

"Of course I'11 go with you," I said. I made no further effort to keep her on the bed. A chill had came into the room when Barney entered and all of my gyrations only served to beat the air into a frosty wind.

"It's all right. We've been twice already in the past year. I know how you feel about the whole business. I'll tell them you weren't feeling well."

"I said I'd go with you."

"There's no need to inconvenience yourself."

"For God's sake!" I grabbed for her hand as she walked past me, missed, and ended up foolishly gripping the hem of her robe.

"I'm coming with you, let's not make a major issue out of it. I should be there, you'll need me...and besides, I have to find out what Barney's up to, asking to be remembered to me."

I tried to laugh to deny my very real interest. And how pathetic, I thought to be so easily charmed. The old bully

whispers my name in my ear and I come running, impatient to hear more. How hungry a fish to lunge at a bare hook.

"Stay with me now," I said. "Just lie in my arms for awhile and we'll fly out in the morning. Don't go downstairs."

She didn't pull away, nor did she come towards me. The line of her robe remained taut between us. I had already lost her. It was as if the small demons of depression had gathered in the kitchen and were keening their seductive sounds. I let go of her robe and released her into the dark. I could not replace her father's lack of love with my own. As usual, Barney was the winner.

And so I went again to the lair of the Resnick's, a place that in my often fevered and offended imagination I pictured as littered with the closely gnawed bones of the Virtuous; I was a well-scrubbed, square-cut Gentile plunging again, never quite prepared, into the messy, corrupt, unruly, dystopian cave of the gangster Jews of the East.

Ellen's "home," the Resnick fiefdom, was called Midwestern to distinguish it from the cities on either coast, but it had more in common with Boston than the municipalities of the

great plains which lay to the west. Hilly and wooded, the city was tucked into the turn of a river that coursed around it like the bow of a shepherd's crook. The river meandered slowly eastward, deep and broad and leisurely until it encountered the resistant geological formation on which the city was built. The waters were pushed north by the rocks for several miles which seemed to infuse them with energy because when they passed the obstructive strata they turned due south and came barreling as swiftly on the earth as if the world were really just a map and south was always down, where all things must ultimately fall.

Cozy and languid on the west and north where the elegant homes were built and ersatz yachtsmen strolled their greensward to the private piers and moored motor launches, the river streaked past the city's industrial east side as if it couldn't get by rapidly enough.

In its southern plunge the river was shallow and so turbid and so panicky-fast it appeared to be trying to dodge the noisome effluvium of the city's population and industry, a mix so noxious and volatile that the water had actually caught fire on one brief but memorable occasion a decade ago. Like an animal scalded with acid as it ran by, the river did not slow or swerve for one hundred miles until it plunged into the Ohio in search of

relief.

From the air the river was alternately brown and silver on the eastward stretch, depending on the reflected sunlight; on the southern fall it ranged from muted auburn to a brilliant, coruscating, unnatural orange. The poisonous side was by far the loveliest--nature's paradoxical aerial aesthetic compensation-- or perhaps a warning in the same way that deadly caterpillars and frogs are marked with unmistakably vivid, fulgent colors screaming "Partake of me and die." In the heightened, melodramatic way in which I usually thought of the Resnicks, that seemed to me an entirely appropriate admonition wherever I entered their city.

Driving by cab from the airport--they had not sent anyone to meet us, a predictable slight that allowed Elaine a few moments of doomed hope as she scanned the waiting faces for someone familiar-we passed the factories and mills that had built the city and given it its character, many now closed for good, some shuttered and inert but still alive, hunkered down fetally to survive the sere windstorm of Oriental production, pulse and respiration turned down to estivation level while awaiting the first splash of American revival.

The plants had produced chemicals and auto parts and artifacts made of rubber, seals and washers and liners to adhere to auto parts and protect them from corrosion by the chemicals. The neighborhoods close to the plants looked much the same, like discarded shells and empty mounds, worm castings on the surface that betray the presence of the inhabitant somewhere deeper under the earth. The neighborhoods had been occupied by the people who made the city-- or rather who had made the plants and mills-and had subsequently pulled themselves out as the next wave of immigrants moved in, inadvertently helping their predecessors in their own ascent by providing a head to step on. Germans came first, long ago in American terms, more than a century and a half, the failures and the youngest sons who could not find or hold a living from the surrounding farms, then the Central Europeans, the Slovaks and Slovenes and Slavs of all description. The Italians made an appearance and lived uneasily alongside the swelling ranks of blacks coming from the played-out tenant farms of the border states and the Deep South. Taken all in all it was a fairly typical American mix of blood and custom, pride, and enmity. Each group in turn provided another gobbet of humanity for the melting pot. When the stew was rich and potent, when the plants were built and the fortunes reaped and the labor done, along came the Resnicks armed with ladle and bowl.

Another exaggeration, I do not paint them fairly, but I have not promised that I would. In fact, I know my bias too well to even try for fairness. The Resnicks have attorneys to see to it they are not substantially abused--to insure, in fact, that they are preferentially treated in all matters of law and equity. Their capacity for litigation is positively Dickensian. But justice is one thing and fairness quite another. The Resnicks came to the city like everyone else, looking for the main chance. Unlike many, the Resnicks saw theirs and took it. Lions and hyenas, jackals and vultures, beetles and worms, all dine alike on the same carcass. It is not fair that we admire the lion and not the others; but the lion is our favorite, and as far as I know, it has never prevented the others from finding a place at the table.

Whatever the character of the city and the images of

industrial decay that it stirred in the national minds, to me it was simply and predominantly the home of the Resnicks, and if there were ruin and debris scattered about, that seemed only appropriate. Corruption does not keep an orderly house. In my more antic moments, I thought of myself upon entering their city as a visitor to the den of some large and carnivorous animals where bones littered the floor and growls and snarls reverberated off the walls. I seemed to be covered by some deceptive scent which confused them, for I had stood amongst the beasts, been nudged by their bulk, they had sniffed at me and passed me by--whether as unclean or not worth the bother I did not know. Or perhaps they had never been hungry when I was there. In any event, having survived my visits to their bone yard, I had come to enjoy them in the vicarious way one can enjoy exposure to potential danger that never becomes reality. The Resnicks were my Lion Country Safari, a sheltered trip through the wild, perfectly safe as long as I didn't get out of the car. Of course, although I didn't know it, all of that was about to change.

At the hospital we found Buddy in the waiting room, trying without success to tune the flickering television set. Buddy was a man in his sixties, one of the ciphers who always seemed to be around Barney and never seemed to do anything else. Maybe just hovering was his job, for he never appeared to have any other. To my knowledge, Buddy did not have a livelihood, he did not have a home--unless one counts the clubs and restaurants frequented by Barney where Buddy danced in attendance--did not even have a last name. At every function, or social occasion or illness--and I never saw Barney any other time-Buddy was there, performing vaguely helpful functions around the bar or buffet, assisting the women in moving platters, unwrapping cellophane from the catered trays of cold cuts, conveying requests to the bartender, or the bandleader, or the maitre d'. Like a stray dog at a cannibal's campfire he was always a step or two beyond the reach of a hurled shoe, but still within range of shouted abuse.

Barney usually had several of these courtiers in attendance, but Buddy was chief among them. Perhaps he was senior, perhaps he was the best at the ineffable skill of toadying.

"Oh, hello, Elaine," he said, holding his ground by the television set.

"Hello, Buddy." They did not approach each other, which was unusual in Resnick gatherings, occasions noteworthy to me for the amount of gratuitous social kissing. Buddy was not close enough to merit a buss nor elevated enough to deserve a handshake.

"Something wrong with the set here. I wonder if they got it grounded properly." This was directed vaguely towards me, as much of a formal greeting as I would get. If I had never accurately defined Buddy's position in the scheme of things, he was equally in the dark about mine. Spouse was not a rank of either significance or permanence with the Resnicks, at least not second generation spouse. Acknowledgment was withheld until one reached the status of grandparent-hood.

He spun the tuning knob on the television set to demonstrate its inadequacy. There was no effect on the hazy screen.

"You'd think they'd get cable at least," said Buddy.

"You'd think so."

"How is he, Buddy?" Elaine asked.

"I only been here a couple hours. The nurses won't tell you anything."

"Have you seen him yet?" she asked.

"Not yet. He's got the, what do you call it, restricted visitors. I only found out this morning when Doris called me. otherwise I would have helped bring him in or something. I don't know what they need an ambulance for, it's not like he don't have anybody willing to drive him."

I saw her stiffen, bracing herself for calamity.

"Using an ambulance doesn't mean anything," I said quickly. "It doesn't imply emergency anymore. People use them just for transportation."

"I know."

"Barney's just exercising his flair for the flamboyant," I said. "He'd have them carry him in on a sedan chair, if he could find one. Isn't that right, Buddy?"

"You bet," said Buddy who would surely have been one of the bearers. He already performed much more demeaning roles for Barney.

"Barney's just like that," he agreed. "He's quite a character. He's a very unusual man, Elaine, you just don't know."

"She knows. Why wouldn't she know?"

Buddy nodded his head, reorienting himself in this new territory. Total compliance was his normal camouflage, and praising Barney was just background noise under normal circumstances. Everyone around did it without reflection, without emphasis. I was a new creature in the forest, or, if not new, seldom seen. As Buddy also knew, I was also temporary, and thus could be defied.

"Elaine and me go way back, don't we, Elaine. I can remember taking her for walks when Barney was doing business out of the Penguin club. Remember that, Elaine?"

"I couldn't have been more than four years old."

"That's what I mean." He gave me a look of satisfaction, as if to say his point was well proven, whatever his point may have been. He returned to his manipulations of the television set. The quality of the picture remained unchanged.

"Don't try to protect me," Elaine said in a hushed tone. She stood close to me, her back to Buddy, but her eyes flickered everywhere nervously, never settling on my face. When her glance did flit past, she would force a tight, wan smile which provided warmth for neither of us. "I mean, thank you, but don't bother. They don't understand it anyway."

"Don't understand what? That a man would protect his wife from casual insult? Or that they are doing the insulting?"

Putting her palm to my chest, she watched a nurse hurry by.

"I'm going to find out," she said.

"I'll do it," I said.

"No, you stay here and relax."

"What shall I do, watch cartoons with Buddy?" Over her shoulder I could see Buddy lift his head at the sound of his name, then turn it slightly, side to side, as if trying to improve his own reception.

Half-trotting, half-walking, an intern went by after the nurse, torn between his need to hurry and his desire for dignity that would be lost by an all-out sprint. His hand clutched the stethoscope that protruded from his jacket pocket.

"It's a hospital," I reminded her. "Don't assume every emergency is his." Her hand was at her throat; I took it in mine and tried to warm it. "He's here for tests, remember?"

As the scurrying intern disappeared down the stretch of the hall, Elaine managed to disengage from that imagined drama and look at me. For a moment her eyes were completely blank, as if she didn't know what I'd been saying, then she showed me the contrived smile and patted my hand while removing hers from my grasp.

"You look tired," she said.

"Commercials," said Buddy from his position by the television set as the volume rose and the pitchmen started. He looking at me as if he required some comment. I, in my modest way, was an expert on the subject.

"Well, that's the way they do it," I said.

Buddy nodded, sagely, apparently assuaged.

"They run a lot of them, don't they?"

"A lot them," he agreed.

I hoped that one of my commercials would not come on. Whether fielding admiration or offering a defense, I had grown very weary of accounting for my livelihood. The possibility was precluded by Doris' arrival.

She clacked down the hallway on heels too high for safety and inappropriate on several other counts given the place, the time of day, and her presumed status as anxious wife of the fallen hero. As always, she was over-coiffed, over-cosmeticized, over-dressed. Her clothes were extremely expensive, her gems were blatant, her eyes and hair were carved and sculpted, and all without so much as a hint of moderation. The effect was that of stropping steel--it did not ameliorate the edge, it honed it.

Not the sort of person you would want to take to bed with you, but then I had never assumed that bedding her was Barney's purpose in marrying her. She was his advertisement, his live-in sandwich board. Like Bedouin women who wear the family's entire wealth in hammered silver ornaments, Doris was a portable, convertible asset. If she did not wear all of Barney's riches on her neck, ears, fingers and back, it was not for want of trying.

To give her her due, she wore the clothes as the designers intended. Consumptively thin and long in both waist and leg, she even stood like a model with pelvis thrust forward and feet arranged at unlikely angles, her whole reflecting edifice seeming to stay upright in fashion's defiance of gravity. Only her face denied the designer's dream of the perfect size six. Emaciated by force of will and stringent diet and elongated nasally by age, her once glamorous visage seemed now to sharpen itself to a point. She looked like a dagger in a jeweled scabbard.

A cigarette was burning in her fingers in open defiance of hospital rules. She inhaled deeply before greeting us so that her kisses and endearments rode on a contrail of smoke.

"Hello, Doll." She and Elaine touched cheeks, necks craning forward.

"Oh, Doris," said Elaine.

"I know, hon," said Doris. "And look at you," she said to me without transition. The last of the smoke curled from her nostrils, hovered briefly, then was breathed back in.

"What about me?"

"No tie, not even for a hospital?"

"I didn't know it was formal."

"I'm only teasing you, Doll." She leaned forward and kissed the air beside my ear. "You know I'm crazy about you. Buddy knows. Aren't I, Buddy?"

Buddy had come to his feet in Doris' presence, and stood there awkwardly, his short arms dang1ing uncomfortably by his side. Buddy was not accustomed to the presence of women.

"She's crazy about you," he offered. "She says so all the time."

"And so is Barney. He wants to see you," Doris said.

"That's why were's here," I said.

"How is he, Doris?" said Elaine.

"Just tests, Doll. He's bitching his head off, but you know Barney. He's all right. He's indestructible, just ask him." Her performance was classic Doris. Tough but with a strong suggestion of amused and tolerant affection underlying the courageous surface, and underneath that a final layer of deep concern for her beloved that she was too strong to reveal to us. It was a performance constructed like a cordial candy with a brittle outer coat, a semi-soft fondant within, and liquid syrup in the center. Her portrayal was superb, as always, flawed only by its unwavering consistency. She never showed just annoyance without the affection. Or just affection without annoyance, for that matter. Doris was never just one thing or another, but always and inseparably all things that she should be to play the role. To look at life in terms of dramaturgy, as I do by profession, her part was well performed but written with a monotonous counterfeit regularity.

"He wants to see you now," she said to Buddy. He left the waiting room as if responding to a whistle too high in pitch for human ears.

"Does he know I'm here?" Elaine asked.

"I told him,, Doll, but he wants to see Buddy first."

"Jesus Christ, Doris," I said.

"What is it, Doll?"

Elaine put a hand on my arm.

"What does she have to do to get an audience with her own father? How does a zero like Buddy rate before Elaine?"

"It's all right," said Elaine.

"The hell it is," I said. "It stinks. As usual."

"You're a lucky girl, Elaine. See how much he loves you? He's even willing to fight me." Doris leaned close to me and her voice dropped half an octave. "Don't tangle with me, Doll, I'm too tough." She winked at Elaine and grinned at me, but I had no doubt that she believed it.

"Besides," she continued, "I'm your best friend and you don't even know it."

"I never doubted it," I said. Anger with Doris was pointless; she deflected it with a shrug, taking none of it personally but assuming, usually correctly, that Barney was the real target. She made no attempt to defuse the anger, but let it spin itself out in futility as she sympathized. By the time one got to Barney, there was little wind left in the sails. It was another service she provided him.

She tapped my elbow with her finger. "I'm going to get you in there as soon as I can," she said. "And you know the dragon lady can do it."

"I don't doubt that you can do it, and I don't think of you as a dragon lady."

She dismissed my insincerity with a flick of the wrist.

"Richie's here. He's in with your dad. He should be here any minute. Barney wants to see you, of course, and he wants to talk to this one, too."

I was "this one", as indicated by a jerk of the thumb.

"What's the sudden interest in me?"

"We've always been interested in you, Doll. You're one of the bright lights of the family, you know that. We're all so proud of you."

Ellen's brother Richie walked towards us as if summoned by the same whistle that called Buddy away. Doris turned to him immediately for verification.

"Aren't we all proud of Hunter?" she demanded. It was a Resnick trait, seeking corroboration for their opinions, as if they were all mutually agreed upon ahead of time. Richie shook my hand while embracing his sister.

"Barney wants to see you," he said, but it was not clear whom he was addressing.

"We have to wait our turn," I said sourly. "Buddy rates."

"He's okay," Richie said to Elaine, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. "He's been having this trouble with nightmares. Irving thought he ought to have some more tests, there's nothing to it."

"I've been so worried."

"I know. I'm glad you came. He's been tough to get along with lately. I mean worse than usual."

"I'm sorry," she said. Ellen dropped her tone to correspond with his. It was a mannerism everyone fell into when conversing with Richie and it lent a hushed, conspiratorial air to any dialogue. One felt--wrongly--that Richie was dealing on a personal, confidential level. Had I not known Richie, I would have thought the two of them were unaware of anyone else in the room. In reality I felt he was most likely figuring how to get an advantage from the situation--whatever the situation really was.

I assumed automatically that it was not as Richie reported it.

He shrugged in response to his sister's sympathy, the

most typical Resnick mannerism of all, dismissing the importance of everything and diminishing the concerns of anyone else.

At forty-five, an age when many men still retain the image of youth, Richie's face had gone into major decline. He looked closer to sixty than his true age, with smudges of grey under his eyes and a skin sallowed to an ashen color that could not be altered by the sun. His flesh was loose and sagging and he had recently taken to wearing a toupee, a strange indication of vanity in someone who had let himself go so completely. He looked like what he was, a man who had abused himself unceasingly for most of his life, treating his body with disrespect and contempt. Thirty years of cigar smoke and late night-early morning card games and an un-stanched flow of alcohol had put their stamp upon him like a boot in the face. He looked a bit like a cigarette carelessly stubbed out. There was a bit of fire still showing through the ash, but not much.

"You know Lou," he said.

Lou Vadone, Richie's equivalent of Buddy, a background presence in Richie's world with no known job or purpose nodded at me from a distance which was both real and metaphorical. Vadone was a creature of the middle distance in the Resnick world, coming into focus only fleetingly. He was like a good supernumerary in a bad historical drama, never calling attention to himself, never taking focus away from the principals, but always ready with an appropriate cry or gesture. He was there to accentuate the central action. He didn't carry a spear, but if one were thrust in his hand, I always felt Vadone would feel right at home with it.

"Lou," I said, nodding.

For just a second Vadone glared at me with an intensity so clear, so unmasked that it startled me. His lip was tugged by the suggestion of contempt, less than a suggestion, a notion as vague as a forgotten memory, but I saw it, or thought I saw it, before it vanished into the usual opaqueness of his gaze. It was a glimpse of a different, deeper, overtly carnivorous world, as if a shifting light had penetrated his mask and revealed a waiting, hungry beast behind it. And if Vadone was unveiled as a predator, I felt exposed as his prey. Unsettled, I glanced at him repeatedly for the next several minutes but whatever I had seen for that fragment had withdrawn to its lair so completely that the only trace of its presence was the remnant tingle along my spine.

Barney sat in bed propped up by pillows, fat as a pasha and as pale as the sheets while others shuffled their little dance of obeisance around him. It was not an unusual scene, Barney held court wherever he went, dispensing favors, withholding kindnesses with indifference, barely appearing to attend the supplicants or their petty hopes and curable miseries. The analogy to a Middle Eastern potentate was apposite. Barney was a sheik of the Midwest, the head of a huge tribe of family and retainers and subjects, and where he went, his majlis went with him. This day there was something different about it, however, and it took me several minutes to realize it was not the presence of nurses and doctors, nor even the tubes that silently fed or drained his arms and nose. It was the curious dichotomy between his face and body. All animation took place in his eyes and mouth while his body lay perfectly still, one hand resting on his chest like a parody of a corpse's pose, the rest of his body as still beneath the sheet as a mummy. He was normally a man who spoke with shrugs and gestures more expressive than words and seeing him so quiet made it appear as if he had lost half his vocabulary.

Ellen sagged against me when we first saw him and I put an arm around her. She told me later it was the oxygen tube

that wormed into his nostril that most effected her, medicine's plastic flag of shaky mortality. Within seconds, however, she pulled away from me and went to his side, giving him an unwanted kiss, chattering with the high, teasing banter she always used with him, as if she could jolly him into loving her.

"You're looking good, Dad," she said. "Not a day over 75."

"I'm seventy-four," he said.

"I know, Dad. I was just teasing you. How are you feeling, you're not letting them hurt you, are you?"

"I wouldn't let them hurt him. They wouldn't dare while I'm around," said Doris.

"Some help she is," said Barney, inclining his head towards his wife. "She's the one who checked me in here in the first place."

"As if I could get him to go anywhere he didn't want to go."

"What's this about nightmares, Dad? I didn't think anything could scare you."

"You want to try them?"

"No, Daddy, I didn't..."

"You're so tough? I've seen you scared by life, kid. Maybe you don't remember."

"I remember."

"I've saved you and your brother a hundred times when you were so shit-scared you couldn't stand up."

"She was just joking, Barney," I said.

"I know what she was doing. There's a time for joking."

"I was just trying to make you feel better," Ellen said. The sparkle was gone from her voice already.

"I like being insulted. I feel a lot better, thank you." And with that he dismissed his daughter from his attention. As we talked awkwardly for the next several minutes he waited with growing impatience each time she spoke, finally interrupting her as if she were no more than noise from the television in the adjoining room. After a time she gave up, my emotionally bruised and battered wife, sitting on the window sill and just watching her father, no longer trying to speak to him but seeking him out vainly, futilely with her eyes. Her pain was so palpable it seemed as if the hospital room should have been hers, not his.

"I saw your commercial--when did I see his commercial?"

"It was during the news, Barney," said Doris.

"No, it wasn't during the news," he said sharply. "It was the other night."

"It's on frequently," I said.

"I know it's on frequently. I'm telling you I saw it, I don't see it frequently. I saw it the other night. It was during something."

"Probably during a commercial break," I said.

"Jesus, I'm surrounded by them," he said. "I'm giving you

a compliment and you turn wise-ass."

"I didn't realize it was a compliment that you saw my commercial. I thought it was just a fact."

He exhaled loudly in exasperation.

"He's very proud of you," Doris chimed in. "We're all very proud of you."

"It's just a commercial," I said. "I do the voice over, I'm only a voice, you don't even see me."

"So who needs to see you? They pay you when it runs, right?"

I have made a living doing the faceless voices of American commerce for twenty years, but before now Barney had always treated it as some sort of incomprehensible hobby, a strange enthusiasm, like fly tying, that I might one day outgrow.

"Yeah, Barney, they pay me."

"Go see when I'm checking out of here," he said abruptly to Doris.

"Irving said the tests will be over by tomorrow..."

"Go see." He tilted his head in a gesture that somehow included his daughter in the dismissal.

"I'll go with you," said Ellen.

"That's right," he said.

I scarcely recognized my wife as the same woman I lived with. This docile, obedient creature who crept so meekly from the room could not be the same person whose daily excess of humor, energy and sparkling spirit coruscated my marriage like a strobe light and gave my daily life the jerky, lurching quality of a silent movie. It was impossible for me to believe that this subdued, snubbed, defeated girl was hiding within my wife and that the garish fustian of manic excess was a disguise or latter day accretion. Unlike other people who were reduced or stripped down to the basic child in the presence of their parents, I felt that Ellen was transformed entirely, altered as completely as a butterfly to a snail by Barney's gristly aura.

"I'll take her to get a cup of coffee," Doris said as she moved out of the room.

Barney lifted his chin at her as if to speed her on her

way. His features assumed a mien of contempt, an expression so habitual it was possible to believe that he had been born that way. Thus subtly were Barney and I alone, and the substance of the meeting would begin. He was as strict in his contempt for women as an Orthodox Jew but his disdain was both broader and simpler. It went beyond the not shaking hands and segregating temples and avoiding feminine contamination of the religious. He never discussed anything he considered important in their presence. And what Barney considered important was business, which was to say everything he valued. The business of commerce, the business of his pleasures, family business. Access to his soul was through business, and he guarded that access with a singular but unforgiving stricture. No women allowed.

"So how are you feeling?" I asked. I knew we were at a new beginning and all that had gone before was merely manners.

"It's my heart." It was always his heart in some manifestation or another. He had received a triple by-pass, angioplasty, a second by-pass operation. He had quit smoking, quit drinking, gained weight, lost weight, gained weight, gained weight. That his heart functioned at all under the stress of obesity, diabetes, and surgery was in itself some sort of miracle. That it functioned poorly was a given.

"What's with the nightmares?"

"I got nightmares. That's why I'm here, but you aren't listening. My heart's the thing. I feel it hopping in my chest it's so strong. Sometimes it beats so hard it makes the bed shake. You think I'm kidding? Feel."

He lifted the fingers of the hand lying on his chest and I realized he had been monitoring himself the whole time.

"Feel!"

"I believe you."

"Nothing's easy with you, is it. Put your hand here, feel."

Reluctantly I put my hand over his heart and he put his

hand atop mine.

"You don't feel that?"

The layer of fat was soft and squishy through the thin hospital gown, soft as a woman's breast but without the definition. As he pressed my hand down, I could feel the firmness of bone and muscle underneath, a reminder that Barney had once been a bull of a man, a football player, a street bully. There was no heart beat that I could discern. He held me in place, his eyes fixed on our hands as if he expected to see them rise and fall with the surging of his pulse.

"You don't feel that?" he repeated.

He looked at me then, grinning savagely, triumph. I had known him for nearly four years and had never touched him except to shake his hand. It felt awkward, then quickly obscene. I was too close to him, the red veins in his eyes struck me with an unwanted, too personal clarity.

"Yeah, I feel it," I said, pulling my hand away.

"It's never been stronger," he said. "It feels like it's going to yank loose and toss me around the room. I ain't going to die. With a heart like that? I'm invincible. I got to be. I got all these people hanging on me. They're not going to pull me down, they're just going to make me stronger."

"Who's pulling on you, Barney?"

"Do you know how many doctors I got? Ten. Ten different specialists, not just doctors, specialties. You think I'm going to die with ten specialists? I'm going to live forever, kid."

"Glad to hear it."

"They think I'm a miracle. They think they have something to do with it, the specialists. They think their pills are keeping me going. I don't take their pills if I don't feel like it. I tell the nurse to stick them, if I feel like it. You know what's keeping me alive? I got too many things to do. I got too many people hanging on me. If I go the whole tent falls down."

"Apres moi, le deluge," I said.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just quoting someone else who thought he was the main tent pole."

"De Gaulle," he said. "Apres moi le deluge. I heard you. You like to think I'm stupid, don't you?"

"I don't think you're stupid, Barney."

"How many books you read a week?"

"I don't know. Not enough."

"I read a minimum four," he said. "Sometimes ten. You never read ten books a week in your life."

"Actually, de Gaulle was paraphrasing Madame Pompadour. Apres nous le deluge."

"You know this? How you come to know this?"

"I only read one book a week."

"So you're saying I don't understand what I read? What is it with you, kid? What do you want from me?"

"Tell her you love her, Barney." It was an appeal of

unwonted personalness. For years we had spoken to each

other with a sort of mutual ironic hostility, a sparring that knew its bounds and one that set me apart. In his way I always felt that he rather liked, perhaps even admired the fact that I was the only one in his purview who did not kowtow to him. It was not affection, but rather an occasional verbal roughhouse, just as he might enjoy tug-of-war with a dog who had hold of his newspaper. Not for long and not often, but sometimes. But asking him to love his daughter was something far beyond our normal scope. To my surprise he took it in stride.

"She knows I love her."

"So volunteer the information, tell her. Tell her you approve of her."

"Approve of what?"

"Of anything she does. Her painting for instance."

"You like those? You like those paintings?"

"I like them, that's not the point. She wants to hear that you like them, she wants to hear that you thinks she's done well as an artist."

"I don't know anything about her art."

I didn't know anything about her art, either, despite

years of determined effort followed by more years of defeated, perfunctory attention but since we weren't really discussing art, I saw no reason to cede the point to Barney.

"She gave you one of her paintings, one of her best."

"Yeah, I got it somewhere."

"You got it on a wall, Barney? That's where paintings go."

"I thought the thing was depressing. I didn't want to look at it all the time. I still got it somewhere."

"Most people would drag it out of the attic and hang it on the wall when the artist came over," I said.

"You want me to be a hypocrite?"

"Hypocrisy has its uses."

"What does she get for one of those things?" he asked.

"Does that matter?"

"It doesn't matter to you? You're so well off you don't need the money?"

"We don't need the money, but we do spend it. She gets paid pretty well, when she sells them."

"She sell a lot?"

"I don't know what a lot is. She sells some. She doesn't paint them to make money, she paints..."

The expression on his face changed abruptly and dramatically as his eyes widened. He looked for a moment as if he were caught in that split second it takes the mind to adjust to the realization that a dire event, long feared and thus discounted has finally happened, that the hand that grabbed you from the dark is not friendly, that the limb that hangs uselessly by your side is your arm. That your heart has stopped.

"Are you all right?" I asked inanely.

The hand that lay across the mound of his stomach quivered with the disconnectedness of a sleeper's spasm and then stopped.

"Barney?...Barney?"

The old man was totally inert, the expression of startled surprise frozen on his face and I felt just as frozen by indecision. There is always a delay between awareness and action. The swimmer has gone down for the third time...but might there not be a fourth? Is the house on fire, or only the drapes...the wall...the floor? The mind recoils from action in the desperate hope that some outside agency will intervene to avert disaster and preclude its own active involvement. Ludicrous images of myself pounding on his chest and administering the kiss of life streaked through my mind, abhorrent visions and I the most unlikely participant-until I realized that I was in a hospital.

"Shall I call the nurse?" I was already on my feet, reaching for the buzzer by his bed. I thought he was dead, did I also think he would give me permission? Tell me not to bother, remind me that I had already delayed too long?

"What do you want with the nurse?" he said. His voice sounded as if it had crawled up from under six feet of dirt. His body did not move but he rolled his eyes towards me without moving his head, following me with difficulty.

"You're not enjoying this conversation? You think I'm stupid, wait till you try the nurse." The fear had drained back into the veins in his eyes, waiting for the next lurch of his heart.

"Christ, Barney, you scared me."

"Think I was dead? I'll let you know when I'm dead."

"I thought you were in trouble."

"You think this is trouble? You led a sheltered life, kid."

"What was it?"

"I was listening to my pump. It talks to me sometimes."

"What did it say? "

"It said I'm a bull. I'm going to live forever."

The hand on his chest twitched again, dismissing the entire incident as if nothing were more commonplace, as if he treated the borderline between life and death like a revolving door.

"Just in case you don't, do something nice for your daughter," I said, struggling to mirror his air of casualness.

"You're still on that?"

"This may be your last chance at redemption."

"Redemption? That's a Catholic thing, isn't it? But you are a Catholic, aren't you. I forget that about you."

"I am not now nor have I ever been a Catholic. I used to be a Christian until I discovered I was supposed to believe in God. I thought that was an awful lot to ask of a growing boy. So I gave it up."

"When was this?"

"Do you care?"

"I asked, didn't I?"

"When I was 12, Barney, we've had this same conversation a couple dozen times."

"Oh. yeah? How's it come out?"

"You evaded the point. As usual."

"How long you been with her?"

"Who is 'she', the cat's mother?" To my amazement I heard myself repeating a favorite and presumably admonitory phrase of my mother's, the relevance of which I had never fully understood until that moment. "We're talking about your daughter, her name is Ellen."

"So how long? Two years?"

"Four. It was quite a wedding. You should have been there."

"I wasn't invited, as I recall."

"You were invited."

"I went to the shul, no one was there."

"We were married by a justice of the peace."

"My mistake. I assumed you'd do it at the shul."

"The rabbi wouldn't perform the ceremony, you know that.

I am unclean."

"If you'd asked me, I would of gotten the rabbi to do it. You think I couldn't?"

"And then you would have shown up, after you'd coerced the rabbi into betraying his convictions? What do you care if it was done in the synagogue or not? You never go, I'm surprised you know where it is."

"What are you so mad about, kid?"

"It makes me mad when you hurt her. It's a sort of husband-like reaction."

"You think this marriage is going to last? 'Cause I wasn't so sure in the beginning. Nothing against you, but sometimes they don't."

"Yes, I've heard that."

"You're not crazy about me, are you, kid?"

"Barney, I'm 43. I'm not a kid."

"By me you're a pischer. How do you want I should call you, Mister?"

"What do you want from me, Barney? Why the summons? Why this meeting?"

"You're supposed to be sympathetic with me now, kid. All this don't impress you? The machines and the blinking lights and the whole thing? "

"It scares me, Barney. Does it scare you?"

He made a wry face, that humorless grimace that passed for his smile. The finger on his chest tapped impatiently--or perhaps in tune with his frantic heart.

"I'm not scared of anything. Nothing scares me. I've

done things in my life you wouldn't believe. I've done things that would freeze you in your tracks. I've looked at sights--I saw a scab trying to cross a picket line get hit so hard with a baseball bat his eye popped right out of his socket. Just hanging there, halfway down his cheek, dangling by the roots, like he was crying eyeballs."

Again he pulled the wry face, but this time he seemed genuinely amused.

"I fucked a schwarze once 'cause it was the only way out." A slight explosive sound in his throat may have been a laugh. His finger tapped faster.