"I don't forget. My mother had one."

"So did mine, finally," said Sam.

I would sit with Lew's mother anyway. My trick was to always answer yes. Every once in a while a no was required, and I could tell by shakes of the head and a kind of muttering that I had said the wrong thing, and when that didn't work and there was still no understanding, I smiled and said, "Maybe."

Lew learned fast enough, and when he struck out with the big oil company with his metered heating oil plan, he saw there were people he could not make headway with and places he would not be able to go, and we were smart enough to stick inside our limits. He never even tried joining the Gentile golf club, even when we had enough friends there to probably get in. He got a bigger kick out of inviting them as guests to ours. We both learned fast, and when we had money for two cars, we had two cars. And when the foreign cars came into fashion and were better than ours, we had two of those too.

No synthetic fibers for Lew, no imitations, ever. Cotton shirts made to order, as long as the cotton did not come from Egypt. Egypt was another pulse tingler for him after the wars with Israel. Custom-tailored suits from a shop named Sills even before anyone knew that John Kennedy was having his suits made there too. And most important: manicures, manicures! He never tired of manicures. I'm sure that came from the dirt from the junkshop, and then in the prison camp. We passed the time that way at the end, when he couldn't even watch television anymore. I gave him pedicures too, and he'd just lie back and grin. We used to do that a lot after we were married; it was something between us. I told the nurses at the hospital to work on his fingernails when they wanted to keep him happy, and they did, the staff nurses too.

"He died laughing, you know," I said to Sam.

"He did?"

"It's true. At least, that's what they told me." I'd said it on purpose that way, and Sammy popped with surprise. "He died laughing at you."

"What for?"

"Your letter," I said, and I laughed a little. "I'm glad you sent us that long letter about your trip."

"You asked me to."

I'm glad I did. I read it to him in parts when it came to the house and we both laughed about it a lot. Then he'd read it again himself. He took it along into the hospital when he knew he was going in for the last time, and he would read it aloud to the nurses. At night he might have the night nurse read it aloud back to him. The nurses adored him up there, I swear they did, not like those cranky, snobby ones here in New York. He was always asking them about themselves and telling them how good they looked, the married ones with children and the old ones too. He knew how to jolly them along and to say the right things when they had problems. "Mary, tell your husband he'd better watch out, because as soon as I get just a little bit better, you're going to have to start meeting me after work and on your days off too, and he'd better start learning to make dinner for himself. And breakfast too, because some mornings when he wakes up you won't be there." "Agnes, here's what we'll do. Tomorrow, I'll check out. You'll pick me up in your Honda at five, we'll go out for drinks and dinner at the Motel on th

e Mountain. Bring enough along with you in case you want to stay out all night." "Agnes, don't laugh," I'd say too, because I'd be sitting right there. "He means it. I've seen him work before, and he always gets his way. That's how come I'm with him." It was really a nice, full trip Sam laid out for us in his letter.

"New Zealand, Australia, Singapore ..." I praised him. "And with Hawaii, Fiji, Bali, and Tahiti thrown in? Did you really mean all that?"

"Most of it. Not Fiji, Bali, or Tahiti. That was put in for you two."

"Well, it worked. He got a big kick out of imagining you in those places. 'Poor Sammy,' is what he said to the night nurse, while she was reading it back to him again on that last night. He died at night, you know, and they phoned me in the morning, and those were just about his last words, Sam. 'Just when he needs me most, I have to be laid up in the hospital. Here the poor guy is going off without us on a trip around the world, and he still hasn't learned how to pick up a girl.'"

BOOK

ELEVEN

32

Wedding

The four thousand pounds of best-grade caviar were divided by automated machines into portions of one eighth of an ounce for the five hundred and twelve thousand canapes that, with flutes of imported champagne, were on hand for distribution by the twelve hundred waiters to the thirty-five hundred very close friends of Regina and Milo Minderbinder and Olivia and Christopher Maxon, as well as to a handful of acquaintances of the bride and the groom. The excess was premeditated for the attention of the media. Some of the surplus was reserved for the staff. The remainder was transported that same night by refrigerated trucks to the outlying shelters in the suburbs and New Jersey into which the homeless and other denizens of the bus terminal had been rounded up and concentrated temporarily for that day and night. The bedraggled beggars and prostitutes and drug dealers thus dislodged were replaced by trained performers representing them whose impersonations were judged more authentic and tolerable than the originals they were supplanting.

The caviar arrived at the workshops of the Commercial Catering division of Milo Minderbinder Enterprises & Associates in eighty designer-colored canisters of fifty pounds each. These were photographed for publication in vibrant high-style periodicals devoted to good taste and to majestic social occasions of the scope of the Minderbinder-Maxon wedding.

Sharpshooters in black tie from the Commercial Killings division of M&M were positioned discreetly behind draperies in the galleries and arcades on the various balconies of the bus terminal, watching most specially for illegal actions by the sharpshooters from the city police department and from the several federal agencies charged with the safety of the President and First Lady and other government officials.

Accompanying the caviar and champagne were tea sandwiches, chilled shrimp, clams, oysters, crudites with a mild curry dip, and foie gras.

There must be no vulgarity, Olivia Maxon had insisted from the beginning.

In this, her anxiety was allayed by the self-assured young man at the console of the computer model of the wedding to come, now taking place as having already occurred, on the monitors in the Communications Control Center of the PABT building, in which the equipment for the computer model had been installed for display and previewing. He flashed ahead to another of the sixty video screens there.

On that one, after the event that had not yet occurred was over, the socialite master of a media conglomerate was answering questions that had not yet been asked.

"There was nothing vulgar about it," he was asserting, before he even had attended. "I was at the wedding. I thought it was fantastic."

Olivia Maxon, her fears for the moment assuaged by this reassuring demonstration of what was projected as inevitable to occur, squeezed Yossarian's arm in a gesture of restored confidence and began fishing for another cigarette while extinguishing the butt of the one she'd been smoking. Olivia Maxon, a smallish, dark woman, wrinkled, smiling, and fashionably emaciated, had been anything but joyous at the unforeseen withdrawal from active cooperation by Frances Beach because of the serious stroke suffered by her husband, and by the need to rely more extensively than she wanted to on John Yossarian, with whom she had never felt altogether secure. Frances stayed much at home with Patrick, forbidding casual visitors.

The equipment in the command bubble in the South Wing of the terminal, between the main and second floors, was the property of the Gaffney Real Estate Agency, and the breezy young computer expert elucidating now for only Yossarian, Gaffney, and Olivia Maxon was an employee of Gaffney's. He had introduced himself as Warren Hacker. Gaffney's burgundy tie was in a Windsor knot. The shoulders of his worsted jacket today were tailored square.

Tags: Joseph Heller Catch-22 Classics
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