stalls and tack room.
And no matter how rich and powerful the Maritimo brothers subsequently became, and no matter how disreputable and poor Father became, Father remained a god to them.
4
AND SOMEWHERE in there, before America entered the First World War against the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, Father’s parents had their peepholes closed by carbon monoxide from a faulty heating system in their farmhouse out near Shepherdstown.
So Father became a major stockholder in the family business, the Waltz Brothers Drug Company, to which he had contributed nothing but ridicule and scorn.
And he attended stockholders’ meetings in a beret and a paint-stained smock and sandals, and he brought old August Gunther along, claiming Gunther was his lawyer, and he protested that he found his two uncles and their several sons, who actually ran the business, intolerably humorless and provincial and obsessed by profits, and so on.
He would ask them when they were going to stop poisoning their fellow citizens, and so on. At that time, the uncles and cousins were starting the first chain of drugstores in the history of the country, and they were especially proud of the soda fountains in those stores, and had spent a lot of money to guarantee that the ice cream served at those fountains was the equal of any ice cream in the world. So Father wanted to know why ice cream at a Waltz Brothers Drugstore always tasted like library paste, and so on.
He was an artist, you see, interested in enterprises far loftier than mere pharmacy.
And now is perhaps the time for me to name my own profession. Guess what? I, Rudy Waltz, the son of that great artist Otto Waltz, am a registered pharmacist.
• • •
Somewhere in there, one end of a noble oak timber was dropped on Father’s left foot. Alcohol was involved in the accident. During a wild party at the studio, with tools and building materials lying all around, Father got a structural idea which had to be carried out at once. Nothing would do but that the drunken guests become common laborers under Father’s command, and a young dairy farmer named John Fortune lost his grip on a timber. It fell on Father’s foot, smashing the bones of his instep. Two of his toes died, and had to be cut away.
Thus was Father rendered unfit for military service when America got into World War One.
• • •
Father once said to me when he was an old man, after he had spent two years in prison, after he and Mother had lost all their money and art treasures in a lawsuit, that his greatest disappointment in life was that he had never been a soldier. That was almost the last illusion he had, and there might have been some substance to it—that he had been born to serve bravely and resourcefully on a battlefield.
He certainly envied John Fortune to the end. The man who crushed his foot went on to become a hero in the trenches in the First World War, and Father would have liked to have fought beside him—and, like Fortune, come home with medals on his chest. The only remotely military honor Father would ever receive was a citation from the governor of Ohio for Father’s leadership of scrap drives in Midland County during World War Two. There was no ceremony. The certificate simply arrived in the mail one day.
Father was in prison over at Shepherdstown when it came. Mother and I brought it to him on visitors’ day. I was thirteen then. It would have been kinder of us to burn it up and scatter its ashes over Sugar Creek. That certificate was the crowning irony, as far as Father was concerned.
“At last I have joined the company of the immortals,” he said. “There are only two more honors for me to covet now.” One was to be a licensed dog. The other was to be a notary public.
And Father made us hand over the certificate so that he could wipe his behind with it at the earliest opportunity, which he surely did.
Instead of saying good-bye that day, he said this, a finger in the air: “Nature calls.”
• • •
And somewhere in there, in the autumn of 1916, to be exact, the old rascal August Gunther died under most mysterious circumstances. He got up two hours before dawn one day, and prepared and ate a hearty breakfast while his wife and daughter slept. And he set out on foot,