361 - Donald E. Westlake [3]
“I don’t know yet. I talked to Ann yesterday, on the phone. She sounded okay.”
“She’s a good girl. Bill’s settled down, she’s good for him.” Then he shook his head and blinked, and came over to wrap his arms around me and pat the back of my head with his palm. “My God, boy,” he said, and his voice broke.
I’d been trying to keep it in, but then I couldn’t. We cried like a couple of women, and kept punching each other to prove we were men.
Then I wanted to go out for lunch and a beer, and Dad acted reluctant about it. He didn’t want to leave the room. He looked okay, so I figured he was just tired from the driving, and the heat. The heat was bad, and the room was air-conditioned.
We ate at a place, and then Dad wanted to go right back to the hotel. I wanted to wander around a little and look at things, but it was three years, so I went back with him. But I kept looking around on the way back. I was born in New York, but Dad and Mom moved out when I wasn’t even a year old yet. I didn’t remember a thing about the city. Or much about Mom. She died when I was two.
In the afternoon, we sat around the room in our undershirts, with the air conditioner on. There were two wide beds, wider than singles but not as wide as doubles. I sprawled all over one of them, head propped up by a couple pillows. Dad wandered around the room, picking up ashtrays and glasses and phone books and then putting them down again. I didn’t remember him so nervous.
Otherwise, he was the same. It didn’t occur to me he should look different. It was as though three years hadn’t happened at all. He was a guy, maybe fifty, with red-gray hair and a middle-aged paunch and plastic-framed glasses with old-fashioned round lenses. Same as always. I wore T-shirts, but he still wore the old kind, thin knit undershirts with just narrow shoulder straps, leaving the upper arms and shoulders bare. He had thick meaty shoulders, stooped a little, freckled.
We spent the afternoon filling me in. My big brother Bill was twenty-six now. He had a wife and a kid, and he was working for Carmine Truck Sales, and he got his driver’s license back over a year ago. Uncle Henry was the same as ever. Like everybody, the same as ever.
When we went out for dinner, Dad wanted to go right back to the room again—talked about getting a good night’s sleep for the drive tomorrow—but I said, “Look, it’s only seven-thirty. Come on, Dad, this is my only chance to look at this place. We’ll get back to the room by midnight, I promise.”
So he shrugged and said okay, and we looked at Times Square and some other places, and I was disappointed. I’d expected something unique. Like Munich, that was unique. When I first got there, I looked at it, and I’d never seen anything that looked like that. But New York was just Binghamton bigger, like a little photograph put through an enlarger. It’s all bigger, and you can see the grain and the bad spots better.
We got back to the hotel before midnight, and the next morning we checked out before nine. The breakfast eggs stayed with me, their taste, and made cigarettes taste awful.
Somebody brought the car around from the hotel’s garage. It was an Oldsmobile. Dad always bought Oldsmobiles. But I’d never seen this one before. It was last year’s, black. When I’d been shipped to Germany, he had a two-tone blue.
The suitcases were loaded into the trunk, and Dad took care of the tipping. Then we got in, and pulled away, heading west crosstown on 53rd Street.
I started to roll the window down, and Dad said, “No, leave it up. Watch this.”
I watched. He pressed a button on the dash, and I heard a whirring. Then a little chill breeze hit me in the forehead from a vent just above the door.
“Air conditioner,” Dad said. “Three hundred dollars extra, and worth every penny of it. Changes the air in the car completely every minute.”
“Lawyering does pretty good,” I said.
“Chased a lot of ambulances lately,” he said. He grinned at me, and slapped my knee. I grinned back. I felt good,