Don't Ever Get Old Read online

  For my father, Robert M. Friedman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my agent, Victoria Skurnick, for her excellent advice and for her perseverance as an advocate for this book. Without her help, Don’t Ever Get Old probably would have been longer, slower, and unpublished.

  Thanks to my editor, Marcia Markland, and to assistant editor Kat Brzozowski, for their passion and dedication, for putting up with my dumb questions, for praising me more than I deserve, and for bringing this object into existence or, in some cases, into electronic pseudo-existence.

  Thanks to Susan and Skip Rossen, Stephen, Beth, David, Lindsey and Martin Rossen, Jenny Landau, Sheila Burkholz, Scott and Rachel Burkholz, Carole Burson, David Friedman, Claire and Paul Putterman, and Rachel, Andrew, and Matthew Putterman, for their support and encouragement. I’d especially like to thank Dr. Steve Burkholz, for helping me get my medical jargon more-or-less right.

  Thanks to my grandparents, Buddy and Margaret Friedman, and Sam and Goldie Burson, and to my great-aunt Rose Burson, whose stories and experiences helped to establish the framework for Buck Schatz and his milieu. Y’all have been my inspiration and so much more, and I hope this makes you proud.

  Thanks to my brother, Jonathan Friedman, for putting up with me, and for being my first reader.

  And thanks to my mom, Elaine Friedman, for everything.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  In retrospect, it would have been better if my wife had let me stay home to see Meet the Press instead of making me schlep across town to watch Jim Wallace die.

  I’d known Jim since back when I was in the service, but I didn’t consider him a friend. So when Rose interrupted my programs to tell me she’d just got a call from the hospital and that Wallace was in intensive care and asking for me, I said I’d have plenty of time to see him at his funeral.

  “You have to go visit him, Buck. You can’t ignore a dying man’s last request.”

  “You’d be surprised, darling, by what I can ignore. I got a long history of being ignorant.”

  I capitulated, though, after I lodged my token objection. I saw no point in fighting with Rose. After sixty-four years of marriage, she knew all my weak points.

  Jim was downtown at the MED, too far away for me to drive. It was getting hard to remember where things were and how they fit together, so my world had become a gradually shrinking circle, with the house in the middle of it. But that excuse wouldn’t save me; Wallace’s daughter, Emily, offered to come and pick me up, even though I’d never met her before.

  “Thank you for doing this, Mr. Schatz,” she said as she backed her car out of my driveway. “I know it must seem weird that Daddy is asking for you, but he’s nearing the end, and they’ve got him on a lot of stuff, for the infection and for the pain, and for his heart. He’s sort of drifting back into the past.”

  She was a couple of years past her fiftieth, I guessed; the flesh around her jawline was just beginning to soften. She was wearing sweats and no makeup and looked like she hadn’t slept in a long time.

  “He’s not so coherent all the time, and sometimes, when he looks at me, I’m not sure if he knows who I am.” She stifled a sob.

  This was shaping up to be a real swell morning. I made a grunting sound that I thought might seem sympathetic and started to light a cigarette.

  Her face kind of pursed up a little. “Do you mind not smoking in my car?”

  I minded, but I let it slide.

  Visiting people in the hospital was a pain in the ass; I knew going in that they wouldn’t let me smoke, and I always worried a little that they wouldn’t let me leave. I was eighty-seven years old and still buying Lucky Strikes by the carton, so everyone figured I was ripe to keel over.

  Jim Wallace was in the geriatric intensive care unit, a white hallway full of filtered air and serious-looking people. Despite all the staff’s efforts to keep the place antiseptic, it stank of piss and death. Emily led me to Jim’s room, and the glass door slid shut behind us and sealed itself with a soft click. Norris Feely, Emily’s overweight husband, was sitting in a plastic chair, staring at game shows on a television mounted on the wall above the bed. I thought about asking him to switch it over to my talk program, but I didn’t want to give anyone the impression that I was willing to stay for very long.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Schatz,” he said, without looking away from the screen. “Pop has told us a lot about you.” He extended his hand, and I shook it. His fingers were plump and sweaty, and he had more hair on his knuckles than he did on his head, but his nails were manicured and coated with clear polish, so they stood out like little pink rhinestones stuck onto some hirsute, misshapen sausages.

  A weak voice from the bed: “Buck? Buck Schatz?” Wallace was hooked up to an IV, a heart monitor, and something I thought might be a dialysis machine. He had a tube in his nose. His skin had taken on a waxy yellow pallor, and the whites of his eyes were brownish and filmy. His breath came in slow rasps and smelled like disease. He looked horrible.

  “You look good, Jimmy,” I said. “You’ll beat this yet.”

  He let out a rattling cough. “Reckon not, Buck. I suppose I’m not too long for this world.” He waved a feeble hand, a mostly unsuccessful attempt at a dramatic gesture.

  “I wish things were different,” I said, which meant that I wished Jim had been kind enough to die without bothering me about it.

  “God, how’d we get so old?”

  “If I’d seen it coming, I’d have got out of the way.”

  He nodded, as if that made a lot of sense. “It means so much that you’re here.”

  I didn’t see why it was so important to Jim to share his final hours with somebody who thought he was kind of an asshole. Maybe he found comfort in familiarity.

  He pointed a quivering finger at Norris and Emily. “Go away for a minute,” he told them. “Gotta have some old war talk with Buck, in private.”

  “Dad, the war was sixty years ago,” said Emily. Her nose was running, and her upper lip was damp with snot.

  “Don’t tell me when’s what.” Jim’s eyes seemed to slide out of focus for a moment, and it took him a couple of deliberate blinks to regain his bearing. “I know what I need to say, need to say to Buck. Get.”

  “D
addy, please.” Her voice trembled as she spoke.

  “Maybe I’d better go home,” I said hopefully. But Jim had gotten hold of my wrist, and he was hanging on with surprising strength.

  “No, Buck stays,” he wheezed as he jabbed a finger in his daughter’s direction. “Privacy.”

  Norris draped a protective arm over Emily and guided her gently out of the room. The sliding door clicked shut behind them, and I was left alone with the dying man. I tried to pull my arm out of his sallow claw, but he held tight.

  “Jim, I know you’re a little confused, but the war was a long time ago,” I said.

  He sat up a little, and his whole body shook with the effort. Those sunken yellow eyes were bulging in their sockets, and his loose jowls twisted with anguish. “I saw him,” he said. Phlegm rattled in his throat. “I saw Ziegler.”

  Hearing that name was enough to knot my guts up. Heinrich Ziegler had been the SS officer in charge of the POW camp where we were stuck in 1944 after our unit got cut off and overrun in southern France.

  “Ziegler’s dead, Jim,” I told him. “Shot by the Russians during the fall of Berlin.”

  “I know he wasn’t so good to you, Buck, when he found out you was Jewish.”

  Without thinking, I rubbed with my free hand at the ridges of scar tissue on my lower back. “He wasn’t so good. But he’s dead.” I was sure this was true. I’d gone looking for Ziegler after the war.

  “Probably dead. Probably by now. But I seen him. Forgive me.”

  He was still hanging on to my wrist, and I was starting to feel nauseous, either from what Jim was saying or from the stink coming off him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was working as an MP, manning a roadblock between East and West in 1946, and he rolled up in a Mercedes-Benz.”

  “No.” I felt a lump rise in my throat. “Not possible.”

  Jim’s stare was fixed on the wall, and he didn’t seem to hear me. “He had papers with a different name, but I knew him when I saw him,” he said. “Lord help me, I let him go.”

  “Why?” My mouth had gone dry. Side effect of all the damn pills I took. I swallowed, hard. “Why would you do that, Jim?”

  “Gold. He had lots of those gold bars, like in the movies. I remember, the whole back end of the car was riding low from the weight of them. He gave me one, and I let him get away.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “We didn’t have no money. Never had none growing up. And we wanted to buy a house. We wanted to start a family.”

  I didn’t say anything. I tried to wrench my arm away from him, but his grip held. One of the machines next to his bed started beeping louder.

  “Forgive me, Buck,” he said. “I’m going over, very soon. I’m scared to die. Scared of being judged. Scared I’m going to hell for the bad things I’ve done. I can’t carry this weight with me. Tell me it’s all right.”

  I tugged my arm a little harder. I had to get out of there; I was going to be sick. “Forgive you? You knew what kind of a monster Ziegler was. You saw the things he did to our boys. You saw the things he did to me, for God’s sake. All a man’s got is his integrity, and you sold yours, Jim.”

  I gave a sharp yank, trying to extricate myself from his grasp, but he hung on, looking at me with pleading eyes. I gave up on getting away and, instead, leaned in close to him. “If there’s a hell, the two of you belong there together.”

  He must not have liked that, because his whole body convulsed, his back arched, and the heart monitor started screaming. Two doctors and a nurse ran into the room, and through the open door, I could see Emily in the hallway with tears streaming down her face.

  “He’s coding,” shouted one of the doctors. “We need a crash cart.”

  The other doctor pointed at me. “Get him out of here.”

  “I’d be happy to go, Doc, if he’d just let me.” Jim’s hand was still wrapped around my wrist.

  But the doctor was already pounding on Jim’s chest and squeezing the respirator bag over his mouth. The nurse came over to me and pried the clenched fingers off my arm. She pushed me back, out of the way, as the doctor hit Jim with the electric paddles. Jim’s body jumped. The doctor with the paddles looked to the nurse.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “No.”

  The machine was still wailing.

  “Gonna hit him again,” said the doctor, turning the voltage knob on the defibrillator.

  “Clear.” The body seized up again, but the line on the monitor had gone flat.

  The other doctor kept working the oxygen bag. I rubbed at my wrist; purple bruises were blossoming out from where Jim had squeezed. A couple of years back, my doctor put me on Plavix, a blood thinner, to keep me from having a stroke. The stuff made me bruise like an overripe peach.

  I pulled out my pack of Luckys and flicked at the silver Dunhill cigarette lighter I carry around, but my hands were shaking so much, I couldn’t get the damn thing to spark.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” the nurse told me.

  “He don’t look like he minds much,” I said, gesturing at Jim.

  “Yeah, well, his oxygen tank probably minds, mister,” she said, and she swept me into the hallway. The sliding glass door clicked shut behind me.

  Norris was leaning against the wall, his face a slackened, puffy mask; Emily was pacing the floor, crying.

  I touched her arm.

  “There’s nothing more you can do for him,” I said. “But I need a ride home.”

  2

  Emily Wallace-Feely looked like she needed somebody to hug her when she dropped me off at the house. I was sorry her father had just passed, but I certainly wasn’t going to touch that woman. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose was still running. Catching a cold would be unpleasant and dangerous; any kind of illness might send me right back to the place I had just left.

  I wished her the most sincere condolence I could manage while staying as far away from her as I could. I was very glad to get out of her car; happy to be away from the hospital’s artificial atmosphere.

  Memphis in early March was still cool and breezy in the mornings. High temperatures would hover in the seventies for a few more weeks before the Tennessee summer kicked in and things got hot and damp. By July, I’d sweat through a T-shirt walking to the curb to fetch the newspaper.

  As I shuffled up the front walkway, I noticed, with considerable annoyance, that the lawn was greening nicely and the perennial bulbs in the flower beds were pushing tentative young shoots above the loamy southern soil. Seemed like last time I’d looked, it had been February and the yard had been brown, which suited me better.

  Back when I could push a mower, I used to take care of the grass. It was something that Rose and I could do outside, together; she maintained the flower beds. Our yard was the best on the block, and we took a lot of pride in it. But since I had heart bypass surgery in ’98, we’d been paying some kind of Guatemalan refugee to handle that stuff. He was a hardworking, fastidious man, and his crew did a good job. I hated his goddamn guts, and I carried a deep resentment against the lawn. The Guatemalans had replaced me, and the indifferent grass had gone right on turning green in the springtime.

  I used to talk to the lawn, cooing and whispering as I mowed and edged, fertilized and aerated. Working my key in the lock as Emily backed her car out of the driveway, I whispered something that might have been “Ungrateful.”

  I went into the kitchen, scrubbed my hands with hot water, and washed down a multivitamin with a glass of orange juice and a cigarette. Rose was cleaning up the breakfast dishes.

  “How’s Jim?” she asked.

  “Dead.” I handed her the juice glass, and she topped it off. “I’m going to see what’s on television.”

  As I was settling into my comfortable groove in the sofa cushions, the phone rang. Rose was running the sink, so I answered it.

  “Hey, Pop.”

  It was my grandson, Billy.

  “Well, if it ain’
t Moonshine,” I said. Billy lived up in New York, where he was a student at NYU School of Law. It was very prestigious and unconscionably expensive.

  “It’s Tequila. People call me Tequila.”

  Billy’s full name was William Tecumseh Schatz, after the great Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Our family held the general in high esteem. My great-granddad Herschel Schatz came to America from Lithuania in 1863, after his family was killed and his village was burned in a pogrom. Union recruiters handed Herschel his conscription papers as soon as he got off the boat, and he rode south with General Sherman to raze Georgia. Every Schatz man since learned at an early age about how fine a thing it is to be born in a country where Jews get to swing the torch.

  My late son, Brian, saw fit to give Billy the great man’s name, but the kid went away to college and joined a fraternity, where “Tecumseh” became “Tequila.” So he was known, forever after, as Tequila Schatz. Everybody was just so proud of him.

  “How come you got to call yourself that?” I asked him.

  “For the same reason you call yourself ‘Buck,’” shouted Rose, from the next room.

  “Oh, hush up. Nobody asked you,” I yelled back at her.

  “So, are you doing okay?” Billy asked. He was always asking about our health. It was annoying, but then again, so was most of the stuff he did.

  “I’m still here,” I assured him. “Had an eventful morning. Your grandmother made me go over to the hospital to visit my old war buddy Jim Wallace, and he died while I was there.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Tequila said.

  “Don’t be. I was pretty sick of that guy. I’ve known Jim over sixty years, and he ran out of interesting things to say while Truman was still in office. And, as it turns out, he was a skunk. At least I don’t have to feel bad that he’s gone.”

  “What did he do that you’re so upset about?” Tequila asked.

  I took a long drag on the cigarette. “Why do you care?”

  “You’re my grandfather. You know, I love you.”

  “Oy.”

  He was always telling me that, I guess, because he never said it to his father. Every time he said good-bye to me at the end of a visit, he would kiss me on my face, even though he was, by most definitions, a fully grown adult man. And the discomfort was in no way ameliorated by the fact that every time he kissed me, I knew he was thinking that I might not last until his next trip home. For my part, I thought the same thing about him; young men are as fragile as the rest of us, but they aren’t smart enough to know it.