oxygen tent. He was all shot up with antibiotics, but his body couldn’t fight off the pneumonia. Too much else was wrong. The hospital had shaved off his thick, youthful hair and mustache, so that an accidental spark couldn’t make them burn like gunpowder in the presence of all that oxygen. He seemed to be asleep, but having nightmares, fighting with his eyes closed, when Felix and I came in.
Mother had already been there for hours. Her frostbitten hands and feet were enclosed in plastic bags filled with a yellow salve, so that she couldn’t touch any of us. This turned out to be an experimental treatment for frostbite, invented right there in Midland City that very morning, by a Doctor Miles Pendleton. We assumed that all frostbite victims had their damaged parts encased in plastic and salve. Mother, in fact, was probably the only person in history to be treated that way.
She was a human guinea pig, and we didn’t even know it.
No harm done, luckily.
• • •
Father’s peephole closed forever at sunset on the day after the opening and closing of my play. He was sixty-eight. The only word Felix and I heard from him was his very last one, which was this: “Mama.” It was Mother who told us about his earlier deathbed assertions—that he had at least been good with children, that he had always tried to behave honorably, and that he hoped he had at least brought some appreciation of beauty to Midland City, even if he himself hadn’t been an artist.
• • •
He mentioned guns, according to Mother, but he didn’t editorialize about them. All he said was, “Guns.”
The wrecked guns, including the fatal Springfield, had been donated to a scrap drive during the war—along with the weather vane. They might have killed a lot more people when they were melted up and made into shells or bombs or hand grenades or whatever.
Waste not, want not.
• • •
As far as I know, he had only one big secret which he might have told on his deathbed: Who killed August Gunther, and what became of Gunther’s head. But he didn’t tell it. Who would have cared? Would there have been any social benefit in prosecuting old Francis X. Morissey, who had become chief of police and was about to retire, for accidentally blowing Gunther’s head off with a ten-gauge shotgun forty-four years ago?
Let sleeping dogs lie.
• • •
When Felix and I got to Father, he was a baby again. He thought his mother was somewhere around. He died believing that he had once owned one of the ten greatest paintings in the world. This wasn’t “The Minorite Church of Vienna” by Adolf Hitler. Father had nothing to say about Hitler as he died. He had learned his lesson about Hitler. One of the ten greatest paintings in the world, as far as he was concerned, was “Crucifixion in Rome,” by John Rettig, which he had bought for a song in Holland, during his student days. It now hangs in the Cincinnati Art Museum.
“Crucifixion in Rome,” in fact, was one of the few successes in the art marketplace, or in any sort of marketplace, which Father experienced in his threescore years and eight. When he and Mother had to put up all their treasures for sale, in order to pay off the Metzgers, they had imagined that their paintings alone were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They advertised in an art magazine, I remember, that an important art collection was to be liquidated, and that serious collectors and museum curators could see it by appointment in our house.
About five people did come all the way to Midland City for a look, I remember, and found the collection ludicrous. One man, I remember, wanted a hundred pictures for a motel he was furnishing in Biloxi, Mississippi. The rest really seemed to know and care about art.
But the only painting anybody wanted was “Crucifixion in Rome.” The Cincinnati Art Museum bought it for not much money, and the museum wanted it not because its greatness was so evident, I’m sure, but because it had been painted by a native of Cincinnati. It was a tiny thing, about the size of a shirt cardboard—about the size of Father’s work in progress, the nude in his Vienna studio.
John Rettig, in fact, died in the year I was born, which was 1932. Unlike me, he got out of his hometown and stayed out. He took off for the Near East