Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,45
fatted calf.”
“I promised Pop I’d get him Karl Malden’s autograph. I wanted to cheer him up. It may take me a few days.”
“How can you make such a stupid promise?” I asked Bingo. “You’re not going to meet him.”
“Yes, I am. Why are you always so negative?”
“Being negative has nothing to do with it. Would the outcome be any different if I was acting like a cheerleader? San Francisco is a big city with tons of people. You might as well say you’re going to meet the queen because you’re in London.”
“Collie, you’re not going to change my mind, so you might as well quit trying. I’m gonna meet Karl Malden and get his autograph for Pop. Why else do you think I’m staying on?”
“You’re crazy. I give up,” I said. But I didn’t give up, the whole situation induced a kind of temporary madness in me. I kept calling and arguing with him about it.
“You’re not going to meet him,” I said, gripping the phone as if I were hanging from the ledge of a cliff.
“Yeah, I am,” he said.
Pop loved the movies, fancied himself a bit of an authority and a discerning critic. His favorite actor was Karl Malden, which meant that Karl Malden assumed a disproportionately large role in our lives— between Ma and Pop and their mutual obsessions, we might as well have hung separate Christmas stockings for him and for Rupert Brooke.
Pop would argue his merits to anyone, always concluding his carefully prepared defense of Malden’s performances by insisting that his looks were underrated, at which point you could always depend on Uncle Tom to say, “What you see in that thin-lipped proboscis on legs, I’ll never know.”
“If I hear the name Karl Malden one more time, I’ll go mad,” Ma would chime in right on cue.
“I still say he was cheated out of the Oscar for On the Waterfront,” Bingo would say, clever enough to know the events he was setting in motion.
“Don’t get me started . . . ,” Pop would say, nicely getting started.
Bingo and Pop never missed an episode of The Streets of San Francisco, starring Malden.
“Hey, Pop, our show’s on!” Bingo used to alert everyone five minutes before the starting credits.
“I’ll spontaneously combust if I see that man’s face staring back at me from the TV screen one more time,” Ma would say, using her fingers to make tiny revolving circles at her temples.
“It’s insane to think that Bing is going to get you an autograph—you can’t will these things to happen,” I said to Pop, who looked at me with pity as he prepared a place of honor on the mantelpiece in the living room.
“You most certainly can,” Uncle Tom interjected, sticking his nose in, emerging from the kitchen in an apron and carrying a dishrag. “And by the way, I take umbrage to your tone,” he continued, his hands red from water so hot that it would practically peel flesh. He took pride in his ability to withstand scalding temperatures. He turned around to face me where I was sitting straddled over Mambo sleeping on the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pop hastily slip away—he didn’t have much tolerance for Uncle Tom’s digressive pronouncements.
“Conventional expectation has no sway over me,” Uncle Tom said, pausing for a moment as he sat on the sofa across from me, squeezing aside Bachelor, waiting out the cutlery, still too hot to handle even for him.
“When I was fifteen years old, I was struck by lightning. They found me in a field still smoking hours later. It turned me into a kind of good-luck charm and a talisman to boot. Some say my powers are even greater than those attributed to the Miraculous Medal of Mary.”
He pointed his finger at me—his certainty poking me hard in the chest.
“Who are you to challenge life’s great mysteries with your dourness? All I know is that I can cure a toothache if I put my mind to it.”
Two days later and Bingo arrived back home, rushing from the cab and in through the back door, hollering for Pop from the kitchen, Ma actually tripping over her trailing housecoat as she rushed from the study to greet him. Something deep inside me recalibrated as I watched Pop proudly hang a framed sheet of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook that said “To Fantastic Charlie Flanagan, with warmest wishes from Karl Malden, June 2, 1983,” dated the last day of Bingo’s trip.