“We can't just forget it,” I said. “John and I will make it up to you. We'll come every day. We'll clean up the house. We'll bring you food. We'll do it for five years or as long as it takes to pay you back.”
“You don't have to,” the Colonel said, and then he turned back to Dolly. He let go of her hand and reached up and took the gold chain and crystal fossil from around his neck. “I want you to have this, Dolly. I want you to wear this and always think of me.” He placed it around Dolly's neck. For the first time we saw Dolly at a loss for words. She just stared at her lap holding on to the Colonel's hands. The fumes from the Jersey refineries smacked us in our faces, and they smelled like death. You could feel the poison pouring into your lungs. I remembered reading an article about how even the deer in New Jersey were showing up with cancers. I got so depressed, I felt that not only John and I had gone down the tubes, but Dolly, the Colonel, and the entire world, the entire money-grubbing world had allowed all the horrible chimneys to spit their pollution into the air and slowly infect and kill everything for hundreds of miles around. But what I really couldn't figure out is that we had really failed the Colonel—but he had forgiven us! I just couldn't understand how Dolly and the Colonel could forgive us. Then John stepped on the gas and took the Studebaker up to her full speed.
“Oh, I feel like a girl again,” Dolly said, touching the fossil around her neck and kissing the Colonel's hand. Suddenly though I noticed the Colonel look like he was really going downhill. There seemed to be an awful amount of sweat pouring down his face.
“What's the matter?” Dolly wanted to know.
“I just had a dream, but I'm wide awake.”
“That's called a
daydream
.” Dolly tried to smile.
“I had this vision,” the old man slowly said, “that I was being nailed inside of a coffin. My feet and arms and legs were immobile. There was nothing I could do to get out of it.”
Dolly took the Colonel's arm and held him tightly. “I'm here, Colonel, and I won't be going away. I'll stay with you.” Again I had the feeling they were sharing a secret.
Now I began to feel ashamed for a different reason. I was ashamed because I could see that Dolly was being very supportive of the Colonel at a time when he needed it, while I was doing nothing for John. I was suffering in my own shame, worried about myself when I should have been able to reach out and do something to help him. I could see in John's eyes as they froze ahead on the highway that he was dying a thousand deaths. Just even looking at him, caring to notice him, seemed a step in the right direction. I looked behind and saw Dolly clutching the Colonel, comforting him. I remembered what I had learned from all the best psychological journals, we are what we
do
, not what we
say
. It took all the guts in the world I had to reach out and put my hand on John's arm. He still couldn't look at me, but just touching him told me what I had to do. I moved next to him and I put my arm around him. And for some reason I kissed his neck. John looked at me for a moment and I could tell I had done the right thing. I could tell he felt, at least for a moment, that he had some worth. That he still was a pretty terrific guy and that I was going to forgive him for what really was a sickness. I always knew that gambling was a sickness, and somehow I felt that without even speaking at this moment, even John realized it was the same as being a drunk. The force that had come over him and made him throw all that money away was no doubt the same kind of force that had made his father an alcoholic. There's not much difference between not being able to say no to a pair of dice or a pack of cards and not being able to say no to a martini.
Then I did something I never thought I'd have the nerve to do. I reached my right hand across to his face and stroked his cheek gently. There was no way he could think I was doing it just as a friend. He kept his eyes glued on the road ahead, as he had to. Somehow at this very moment, I needed him to know that I loved him fully, totally,
desperately
—and that I not only forgave him, but would stay with him until the end of the universe and the death of infinity.
After a while I checked on Dolly and the Colonel in the rearview mirror. They were hypnotized by each other. I watched as the Colonel took Dolly's hand in his and I heard him speaking over the din of the motor: “My life has always been my work. I've never loved a woman, but now I see all that I have missed.” He kissed Dolly's hand, and she beamed as though she were the Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.
By the time we were crossing the bridge back onto Staten Island, Dolly was speaking about the future. If it was up to her, she said, she would like to see the town house, to share all the memories the Colonel had stored there. She thought his blueprints and plans should be donated to some engineering institute so they could be put on display and used as reference for all the young people coming along. We shot along like a yellow comet. We had just passed Todt Hill Road when I couldn't help noticing the Colonel's face looked as though he was in some discomfort. I thought maybe I was seeing things. But a few moments after that I was aware of the fact that beads of sweat were beginning to form on his temple. I could see that John had finally noticed in the rearview mirror. But Dolly was too busy talking to see. I turned around to look at the Colonel and I could see even his breathing had changed. He was taking in deep breaths of air, obviously not even listening to Dolly anymore. I tried to hold back from letting John know how afraid I was, because I didn't want to make him any more anxious than he was. I had sensed something awful was going to happen. And when I heard the Colonel's voice, I knew he was really in trouble this time.
“Oh, God, the pain—the pain. … Oh, God—” The words came out of the Colonel's mouth and lingered in our ears for just a moment and then were replaced by a cry of anguish which could only belong to a dying man.
If it hadn't been for Dolly, Lorraine and I would have just collapsed. We hadn't heard cries like those that came out of the Colonel since our Pigman had died of a heart attack right in front of us. Dolly took complete charge. She made me keep driving beyond the Pigman's house and go directly to Staten Island Hospital. She got the attendants at the emergency room to put the old man on a stretcher and roll him directly past Admissions into an examination room. Within minutes a doctor was hovering over the old guy and Dolly said a few quick words. She knew all the right information, and before the blood could come back into Lorraine's and my faces, the old man was being rolled up to an intensive-care floor. Lorraine and I stood mute and helpless, and we were so grateful for having an adult help us for a change. I guess we sensed the limitations of being a kid when the chips were down.
Before Dolly went up with the Colonel, she came to us in the hall and leveled with us.
“
He's going to die
,” she said. “He knew he only had a few weeks to live anyway, which is why he ran away from the town house. He wanted to die on his own and not in a poorhouse.”
“You knew this?” I managed to ask.
“He told me the first night I met him,” Dolly said. “He had been cut open several times before that when surgeons tried to patch him up. The last time all they could do was sew him back up and tell him to get his affairs in order. He loves you,” Dolly said. “He loves you because you saved him from being alone in his last days.”
“Will we see him again?” Lorraine asked.
Dolly looked very depressed. “I think we should all go up now and see if we can say good-bye.”
She walked quickly to the elevators, Lorraine and I scurrying to keep up with her. We got into one of the elevators. It was huge, designed to carry stretchers and X-ray machines and stuff like that. The one we got in had a couple of sad-looking visitors, a doctor who obviously thought he was hot stuff, and two nurses balancing plasma jars attached to an old lady patient who looked like she was going to croak any minute. The old lady had all kinds of needles in her and a tube up her nose. She looked at us as though she wanted to say, “Oh, my poor kids, life is so painful I feel sorry for what lies ahead for you.”
The lights indicating the different floors of the hospital lit up as we rose in the air: NURSERY, CARDIOLOGY, PEDIATRICS, etc. Finally we got off at the intensive-care ward. Dolly seemed to sense exactly where to go. She didn't even have to inquire at the nurses' station. In a moment we were outside a room where there was a lot of activity. We could glimpse inside, where the Colonel was being lowered onto a bed. One nurse was pressing a button thing on the end of a cord that lowered the head of the bed. Another nurse was shoving a needle into the Colonel's arm and attaching it to a hanging bag of clear fluid. Still another was attaching electrodes to his body and taking readings. A doctor gave him an injection of something and was talking so quietly we couldn't hear him from the doorway. At this point it seemed even Dolly didn't know what to do. A nurse came toward us saying, “You'll have to wait in the lounge. You'll have to wait in the lounge.”
“I'm staying with him,” Dolly said loud and clear.
“Are you his wife?” the nurse asked.
“I'm his girl friend,” Dolly shot at her.
“Let her in here!” came a loud voice from the room. “Let her and my kids in here!” The Colonel had twisted his face to the side and practically yelled from the bed. The doctor had a stethoscope on the Colonel's heart and nodded
okay
to the nurse.
Dolly moved swiftly to the Colonel's side and took his hand. Lorraine and I couldn't budge from the doorway, almost afraid we'd use up too much of the oxygen in the room. Then an attendant barged past us rolling a real oxygen tank with a water gauge and all. He banged it down on the floor to the right of the Colonel's bed. Dolly was saying soothing things to the Colonel like “Everything's going to be all right,” which sort of counteracted all the other voices that were saying things like “Give him three milliliters,” “What's his pulse?” and “Notify X ray.” All these people hovering over the Colonel when suddenly over it all came the Colonel's voice loud and clear:
“I want to marry her! I want to marry her!”
Everybody was shocked. Even Dolly.
“Get me a priest! Get a minister! I want to marry her!” the Colonel brayed.
“Later,” Dolly whispered kindly.
“
Now!
” the Colonel demanded.
“Now is not the time to get married,” the doctor said, loading another needle.
“Don't tell me what I want to do, you [email protected]#$%,” the Colonel replied. Then he sat up in the bed and looked frantically for help. His eyes hit upon us at the doorway. “Get me a priest! Get me anybody!” he screamed at us.
“Yes, sir,” I yelled back.
“
That's my boy!
” the Colonel practically cried. “
That's my boy!
”
I grabbed Lorraine's hand and dragged her all the way down the hall and into the elevator. It was empty except for some poor old lady in a Persian lamb coat who was simply crying by herself in the corner. Within two minutes Lorraine and I were in the Studebaker roaring out of the big oval in front of the hospital.
“Where are we going to get a priest?” Lorraine wanted to know.
“
Serendipity
,” I said, and it was the first time I had ever used the word in my life. I had first seen the word in an article about gambling, and it was supposed to mean something about being in the right place at the right time. I didn't really understand the whole meaning of it, but it meant that if you kept your eyes open the chances were pretty good that there had to be something that had been right in front of your eyes all the time and could solve almost any problem that ever came up and you could win if you really wanted to be a winner. Even the Studebaker seemed to know where it was going as it exploded its way straight back up the road.
“If Dolly marries him and he dies, won't she have to pay all those tax bills?” Lorraine wanted to know.
“No,” I said. “And even if she does, there'll be a lot left over after she sells the town house.”
“The crocodile-skin room must be worth a lot, don't you think?”
“You bet,” I agreed. “And don't forget his Keogh plan.”
As we neared 190 Howard Avenue, I took my foot off the gas to let the motor quiet down. Sure enough, there was the sound of Gus barking away from within the house. In another moment we could see him at the front window, clawing away, looking very desperate—as though he knew something had happened to his master. But we weren't going to the house. We were going past it to the break in the huge hedges and down the driveway to the convent. I left Lorraine in the car with the motor running and dashed up the steps to the main entrance. I pressed the doorbell and banged on the front door until the nun who had been driving the tractor lawn mower appeared and opened up.
“I need a priest to marry somebody,” I practically screamed.
“What's the rush?” she asked.
“The groom is eighty-two years old and dying,” I said.
As if God himself had told her what was going on, she mumbled something about Father Santini, the resident priest, who lived in the garage apartment. I ran after her farther down the long driveway to the garage. She banged on a side door down the slope behind the garage and a very confused priest answered the door. I began shouting at him about this old man
who lived next door but who really was a runaway because the IRS had taken away his town house and he had broken in only to lick his wounds and die in peace—but he fell in love with a sixty-year-old custodial worker by the name of Dolly and he was dying now at Staten Island Hospital and wanted to marry her and could the priest come along this very minute before he croaked altogether from diverticulosis!