Deadeye Dick Page 0,13
much as the Depression that wrecked the Waltz Brothers chain. Pharmacists have no business being in the food business, too. Leave the food business to those who know and love it.
One of Father’s favorite jokes, I remember, was about the boy who flunked out of pharmacy school. He didn’t know how to make a club sandwich.
• • •
There is still one Waltz Brothers Drugstore left, I have heard, in Cairo, Illinois. It certainly has nothing to do with me, or with any of my relatives, wherever they may be. I gather that it is part of a cute, old-fashioned urban renewal scheme in downtown Cairo. The streets are cobblestoned, like the floor of my childhood home. The streetlights are gas.
And there is an old-fashioned pool hall and an old-fashioned saloon and an old-fashioned firehouse and an old-fashioned drugstore with a soda fountain. Somebody found an old sign from a Waltz Brothers drugstore, and they hung it up again.
It was so quaint.
I hear they have a poster inside, too, which sings the praises of Saint Elmo’s Remedy.
They wouldn’t dare really stock Saint Elmo’s Remedy today, of course, it was so bad for people. The poster is just a joke. But they have a modern prescription counter, where you can get barbiturates and amphetamines and methaqualones and so on.
Science marches on.
• • •
By the time I was old enough to bring guests home, Father had stopped mentioning Hitler to anyone. That much about the present had got through to him, anyway: The subject of Hitler and the new order in Germany seemed to make people angrier with each passing day, so he had better find something else to talk about.
And I do not mean to mock him. He had been just another wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, like the rest of us, and then all the light and sound poured in.
But he assumed that my playmates were thoroughly familiar with Greek mythology and legends of King Arthur’s Round Table and the plays of Shakespeare and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust and Wagnerian opera and on and on—all of which were no doubt lively subjects in Viennese cafés before the First World War.
So he might say to the eight-year-old son of a tool-checker over at Green Diamond Plow, “You look at me as though I were Mephistopheles. Is that who you think I am? Eh? Eh?”
My guest was expected to answer.
Or he might say to a daughter of a janitor over at the YMCA, offering her a chair, “Do sit down in the Siege Perilous, my dear. Or do you dare?”
Almost all my playmates were children of uneducated parents in humble jobs, since the neighborhood had gone downhill fast after all the rich people but Father and Mother moved away.
Father might say to another one, “I am Daedalus! Would you like me to give you wings so you can fly with me? We can join the geese and fly south with them! But we mustn’t fly too close to the sun, must we. Why mustn’t we fly too close to the sun, eh? Eh?”
And the child was expected to answer.
On his deathbed at the County Hospital, when Father was listing all his virtues and vices, he said that at least he had been wonderful with children, that they had all found him a lot of fun. “I understand them,” he said.
• • •
He gave his most dumbfoundingly inappropriate greeting, however, not to a child but to a young woman named Celia Hildreth. She was a high school senior, as was my brother—and Felix had invited her to the senior prom. This would have been in the springtime of 1943, almost exactly a year before I became a murderer—a double murderer, actually. World War Two was going on.
Felix was the president of his class—because of that deep voice of his. God spoke through him—about where the senior prom should be held, and whether people should have their nicknames under their pictures in the yearbook, and on and on. And he was in the midst of an erotic catastrophe, to which he had made me privy, although I was only eleven years old. Irreconcilable differences had arisen between him and his sweetheart for the past semester and a half, Sally Freeman, and Sally had turned to Steve Adams, the captain of the basketball team, for consolation.
This left the president of the class without a date for the prom, and at a time when every girl of any social importance had been spoken for.
Felix executed a sociological