She said in surprise, “I’m not pregnant.” And was even more surprised when I burst out laughing. She really had no sense of humor, except when she wrote.
Finally I convinced her that I meant it. That I really wanted to marry her, and she blushed and then started to cry.
So on the following weekend I went out to her family’s house in Queens for Sunday dinner. It was a big family, father, mother, three brothers and the three sisters, all younger than Value. Her father was an old Tammany Hall worker and earned his living with some political job. There were some uncles there and they all got drunk. But in a cheerful happy-go-lucky way. They got drunk as other people stuff themselves at a big dinner. It was no more offensive than that. Though I didn’t usually drink, I had a few and we all had a good time.
The mother had dancing brown eyes. Value obviously got her sexuality from the mother and lack of humor from her father. I could see the father and uncles watching me with shrewd drunken eyes, trying to judge whether I was just a sharpie screwing their beloved Value, kidding her about marriage.
Mr. O’Grady finally got to the point. “When are you two planning to get hitched?” he asked. I knew if I gave the wrong answer, I could get punched in the mouth by a father and three uncles right then and there. I could see the father hated me for screwing his little girl before marrying her. But I understood him. That was easy. Also, I wasn’t hustling. I never hustled people, or so I thought. So I laughed a rid said, “Tomorrow morning.”
I laughed because I knew it was an answer that would reassure them but one they could not accept. They could not accept because all their friends would think that Value was pregnant. We finally settled on a date two months ahead, so that there would be formal announcements and a real family wedding. And that was OK with me too. I don’t know whether I was in love. I was happy and that was enough. I was no longer alone, I could begin my true history. My life would extend outward, I would have a family, wife, children, my wife’s family would be my family. I would settle in a portion of the city that would be mine. I would no longer be a single solitary unit. Holidays and birthdays could be celebrated. In short, I would be “normal” for the first time in my life. The Army really didn’t count. And for the next ten years I worked at building myself into the world.
The only people I knew to invite to the wedding were my brother, Artie, and some guys from the New School. But there was a problem. I had to explain to Vallie that my real name wasn’t Merlyn. Or rather that my original name was not Merlyn. After the war I changed my name legally. I had to explain to the judge that I was a writer and that Merlyn was the name I wanted to write under. I gave him Mark Twain as an example. The judge nodded as if he knew a hundred writers who had done the same thing.
The truth was that at that time I felt mystical about writing. I wanted it to be pure, untainted. I was afraid of being inhibited if anybody knew anything about me and who I really was. I wanted to write universal characters. (My first book was heavily symbolic.) I wanted to be two absolutely separate identities.
It was through Mr. O’Grady’s political connections that I got my job as federal Civil Service employee. I became a GS-6 clerk administrator to Army Reserve Units.
After the kids, married life was dull but still happy. Value and I never went out. On holidays we’d have dinner with her family or at my brother Artie’s house. When I worked nights, she and her friends in the apartment house would visit each other. She made a lot of friends. On weekend nights she’d visit their apartments when they had a little party and I’d stay in our apartment to watch the kids and work on my book. I’d never go. When it was her turn to entertain, I hated it, and I guess I didn’t hide that too well. And Vallie resented it. I remember one time I went into the bedroom to look at the kids and I stayed in there reading some pages of manuscript. Vallie left our guests and came looking for me. I’ll never forget the hurt look when she found me reading, so obviously reluctant to come back to her and her friends.
It was after one of these little affairs that I got sick for the first time. I woke up at two in the morning and felt an agonizing pain in my stomach and all over my back.
I couldn’t afford a doctor so the next day I went to the Veterans Administration hospital, and then they took all kinds of X-rays and made some other tests over a period of a week. They couldn’t find anything, but I had another attack and just from the symptoms they diagnosed a diseased gall bladder.
A week later I was back in the hospital with another attack, and they shot me full of morphine. I had to miss two days’ work. Then about a week before Christmas, just as I was about to finish up work on my night job, I got a hell of an attack. (I didn’t mention that I was working nights in a bank to get extra money for Christmas.) The pain was excruciating. But I figured I could make it to the VA hospital on Twenty-third Street. I took a cab that let me off about a half block from the entrance. It was now after midnight. When the cab pulled away, the pain hit me an agonizing solar plexus blow. I fell to my knees in the dark street. The pain radiated all over my back. I flattened out onto the ice-cold pavement. There wasn’t a soul around, no one that could help me. The entrance to the hospital was a hundred feet away. I was so paralyzed by pain I couldn’t move. I wasn’t even scared. In fact, I was wishing I would just die, so that the pain would go away. I didn’t give a shit for my wife or my kids or my brother. I just wanted out. I thought for a moment about the legendary Merlin. Well, I was no fucking magician. I remember rolling over once to stop the pain and rolling off the ledge of the sidewalk and into the gutter. The edge of the curb was a pillow for my head.
And now I could see the Christmas lights decorating a nearby store. The pain receded a little. I lay there thinking I was a fucking animal. Here I was an artist, a book published and one critic had called me a genius, one of the hopes of American literature, and I was dying like a dog in the gutter. And through no fault of my own. Just because I had no money in the bank. Just because I had nobody who really gave a shit about whether I lived or not. That was the truth of the whole business. The self-pity was nearly as good as morphine.
I don’t know how long it took me to crawl out of the gutter. I don’t know how long it took me to crawl through to the entrance of the hospital, but I was finally in an arc of light. I remember people putting me in a wheelchair and taking me to the emergency room and I answered questions and then magically I was in a warm white bed and feeling blissfully sleepy, without pain, and I knew they had shot me with morphine.
When I awoke, a young doctor was taking my pulse. He had treated me the other time and I knew his name was Cohn. He grinned at me and said, “They called your wife, she’ll be down to see you when the kids go to school.”
I nodded and said, “I guess I can’t wait until Christmas for that operation.”
Dr. Cohn looked a little thoughtful and then said cheerily, “Well, you’ve come this far, why don’t you wait until Christmas? I’ll schedule it for the twenty-seventh. You can come Christmas night and we’ll get you ready.”
“OK,” I said. I trusted him. He had talked the hospital into treating me as an outpatient. He was the only guy who seemed to understand when I said that I didn’t want the operation until after Christmas. I remember his saying, “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but Fm with you.” I couldn’t explain that I had to keep working two jobs until Christmas so my kids would get toys and still believe in Santa Claus. That I was totally responsible for my family and its happiness, and it was the only thing I had.
I’ll always remember that young doctor. He looked like your movie actor doctor except that he was so unpretentious and easy. He sent me home loaded up with morphine. But he had his reasons. A few days after the operation he told me, and I could see how happy it made him to tell me, “Listen, you’re a young guy to have gallbladder and the tests didn’t show anything. We went on your symptoms. But that’s all it was, gallbladder, big stones. But I want you to know there was nothing else in there. I took a real good look. When you go home, don’t worry. You’ll be as good as new.”
At that time I didn’t know what the hell he meant. In my usual style it only came to me a year later that he had been afraid of finding cancer. And that’s why he hadn’t wanted to operate before Christmas with just a week to go.
Chapter 6
I told Jordan and Cully and Diane how my brother, Artie, and my wife, Vallie, came to see me every day. And how Artie would shave me and drive Vallie back and forth from the hospital while Artie’s wife took care of my kids. I saw Cully smiling slyly.
“OK,” I said. “That scar I showed you was my gallbladder scar. No machine guns. If you had any fucking brains you’d know I would never be alive if I got hit like that.”
