Death Wish

“Damn it, I’m her father.”

“Right now you’re a reminder of her mother, I think.”

A sharp remark rose to his tongue—something acid about Jack’s license to practice parlor psychiatry—but he had let it die there; Jack was too vulnerable, there was too much heat already.

So he had left, bile in his throat. A taxi from Horatio Street to the upper West Side. He’d got out of the taxi at the corner of Seventieth and West End, crossed the avenue with the light and walked up the half-block to the apartment house, staring with belligerent suspicion at every face on the street.

The night man on the door gave him a nod and a polite smile of recognition as if nothing had ever happened. Was it possible he didn’t know? Paul stopped automatically to unlock the mailbox. It was crowded with small stiff envelopes—sympathy cards. He shoved them in his pocket, locked the mailbox and went along the corridor from the lobby to the back elevator. He rode up part-way with a middle-aged couple he’d seen often enough to say hello to; he didn’t know their names. If they had seen the papers they hadn’t made the co

Someone had slid a note under the door. It lay askew on the carpet. He bent down to pick it up, ready for anger, half expecting it to be a threatening letter from the killers. It was a sympathy card from the Bernsteins next door. He put it together with the stack from his pocket and left the pile on the end-table under the mirror in the foyer.

They had moved into this apartment after Carol had started college and it had become regretfully evident that she was no longer going to live at home with them for any extended periods of time. There was only the living-room, middle-sized, and the large corner bedroom and bath, and the kitchen off the entrance foyer. The building was forty or fifty years old, it had the high ceilings and multitudinous closets of its vintage, the curious moldings that ran around the walls a foot below the ceiling, the Edwardian ceiling-light fixtures. It wasn’t quite old enough to have a bathtub on claw feet, but the bathroom had that flavor to it. It was a small apartment but comfortable, it had more than its share of windows and most of them looked down upon the attractive row of converted brownstones on the opposite side of Seventy-first Street.

He kicked the door shut behind him and glanced into the kitchen and walked into the living room. The place had been tidied; everything was neat. Had the police gone to the trouble? It wasn’t the cleaning lady, she came on Mondays. He scowled; he had expected to find wreckage, he had occupied himself thinking about cleaning the place up.

The flavor of Esther was in the place but it didn’t seem to affect him. He walked through the rooms trying to feel something. It was as if his subconscious was afraid to let him feel anything.

Something unfamiliar caught his eye and it took him a moment to figure out what it was. He had to run his eyes around the living room and study each object. The chairs, the coffee table, the bookcase, the television, the air-conditioner in the window.…

He went back. The television. The killers had stolen the television.

It was a console; it stood in the corner where the old portable had squatted on its table. It looked like a color set—the kind with built-in stereo and AM-FM radio. He crossed the room in four long strides.

There was a note:

Paul—

In hopes this may make it just a

bit more bearable—

Our very deepest condolences

,

—The Guys at the Office

P.S.—We stocked the refrig

.

It broke him down: he wept.

*  *  *

They had never had a color set and he hadn’t seen many color programs—only the occasional badly tuned football game above a bar, and once or twice the Academy Awards on some friends’ enormous set. He spent twenty minutes fiddling with the thing, tuning in all the cha

The phone rang. It was Jack. “Dr. Rosen just left. He’s prescribed some stronger sedatives. He’s arranging an appointment for her with a shrink Monday morning.”

“Well, I suppose that’s the best thing right now.”

“I hope it’ll help snap her out of it. I imagine it will. Rosen says he’s got a very good man.”

“I imagine he would.”

“It was damned nice of him to come. Where can you find a doctor willing to make house calls on Friday night any more?”

“He’s been our family doctor for almost twenty years.”

“Well, I’ll let you know if anything changes. Right now she’s asleep—doped up. The poor kid. Christ, this is a rotten thing.… How about you? Are you all right up there? You can still come back down and spend the night if you’d feel better. I know it must be miserable up there all alone.”

“I’ll have to get used to it sometime. This is as good a time to start as any.”

“There’s no need to make it too hard on yourself, Pop.”

“I’ll be all right,” he growled. “I’ll probably drop by tomorrow to look in on Carol.”

“Fine.”

After he hung up the apartment seemed emptier. He reversed his earlier decision and made a drink. Carried it into the bedroom and sat down, jerked at his tie, bent down and began to unlace his shoes.

He kicked them off and reached for his drink and heard himself cry out.

He couldn’t believe it. He had always managed to bottle things up; anything else was weakness. He sat like a stone, writhing inside, experiencing terror from the crazy random impulse to do violence: he wanted to smash out at anything within reach.

Finally he began swinging his fist rhythmically against the side of the mattress. He got down on one knee and swung from the floor. It didn’t hurt his fist and it didn’t do the mattress any damage and after a little while he knew there wasn’t going to be any satisfaction in it. He remembered a kid in high school who’d put his fist through the panel of a door in one of the study halls—all the way through it. He couldn’t remember whether the kid had done it on a dare or just out of sheer rage; the kid had been one of the athletes, a bully everyone feared. Paul thought about slugging a door but he was afraid of pain, he didn’t want to break his hand.

A hammer, he thought. That would feel good—taking a hammer to something, swinging it as hard as you could.

And do what? Smash up the furniture? The walls?

His brain kept frustrating him.

In the middle of the night he got up and took a shower. Lying on the bed drying off, he wished Esther were there. He would have shouted at her and it would have made him feel better.

Just last week he had noticed how overweight she was getting—the way the flesh of her sapless breasts and her armpits were bunched around the edges of her bra; how thick her hips had become, her waist and thighs, the soft heavy padding of flesh under her chin. Well she was forty-six years old, a year younger than Paul, almost to the day: they were both Aquarians.

Aquarian acquaintances, he thought. All the intense promises when you were youthful; but after marriage they had settled into their lives without any sparks. They had slowly got fat and out of shape. They had both been strangely old before they should have been—as if they had never been young.

In the begi