Again there was the note of sham complaint, as if the uniformity of prisoners’ cells obeyed some principle that Dr. Storch endorsed. Anyway, it was true: same cot, lamp, chair, table, same small chest of drawers. Same boxed ration of blue sky. No photographs. A few pocket books piled on the table with typed library labels taped to their spines. The topmost book was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. My grandfather had adored this classic of “hard” science fiction when it was first serialized in Astounding, enough to drop three dollars when Doubleday brought out a hardcover edition a year later. In 1974, when he pressed a fresh copy on me, it remained one of his all-time favorite books.
My grandfather did not acknowledge to Dr. Storch this evidence of a shared interest that might form the basis of a friendship. It was like when you dropped by the neighbors’ at suppertime with a piece of misdelivered mail, and their house had a warm smell of carrots and bay leaf, and before they had a chance to ask you to sit down, have a glass of water, try a little of the soup, at least take off your coat, you shook your head and said, Don’t worry, I’m not staying.
“Very nice,” he said.
They went along the gallery toward the bathroom. Most of the other prisoners had already gone down to the mess hall, leaving their cell doors unlocked or ajar. Calendar girls, some photographs of children. Prisoner watercolors of fruit, Ava Gardner, the green Shawangunks. A porcelain Virgin with a halo of gold wire.
“I think you’ll find the food quite palatable,” Dr. Storch said.
“Dinner was all right. Beef and macaroni. Hard to ruin.”
“We do get a lot of macaroni.”
“It’s filling.”
“And cheap. I’m a dentist, by the way,” Dr. Storch said. “Not an MD. If you were wondering. And I would like to tell you the truth about why I’m here before you encounter the remarkable mythology my accent has engendered—every day a fresh outrage seems to have been added to the catalog of my mythical crimes! I feel it’s imperative I tell you the truth, you see, because I think . . . Do I perceive that you are a Jew? Yes. Well, here it is: Rest assured, I am not a Nazi. I am a German, yes, of course. But I detested Hitler, and I was never a member of the Nazi Party. I left Germany just before the invasion of Poland, and lived through the Blitz in London, where I was nearly killed on three occasions by German ordnance, including a V-2 rocket. It was never my job to extract the gold teeth from mouths of deportees when they arrived at Auschwitz or Belsen. I lived my whole life in Hamburg and was never near any of those places. I never conducted hideous dental experiments or operated on patients without anesthesia. I never gave anyone a forked tongue or implanted a whore’s jaw with shark’s teeth. After the war I emigrated to Buffalo, where in 1953 I was arrested for practicing dentistry without a license, a felony in the state of New York, alas. And that’s why you find me living in the cell next to yours.”
It all came out in a burst, as though Wallkill regulations required that confession be done promptly, before one reached the bathroom door. There was a lot to digest in Dr. Storch’s confession. It was hard to know what to say in reply.
“I’m a salesman,” my grandfather said.
As they walked into the bathroom, Dr. Storch stiffened. He sidled around my grandfather and ducked into one of the stalls. At the trough-style sink a prisoner with a cauliflower ear and a barrel chest stood washing his hands. His forearms were blotched with dull tattoos. He closed the tap and went over to one of the continuous loops of linen towel that were mounted in white boxes on the wall. Patiently, he dried the blocks of pink marble that served him for hands. He smiled at my grandfather and said, “Hiya.” Preceded by a half-second of cool appraisal, it was a friendly smile. Ex-marine, my grandfather guessed. Middleweight to light heavyweight. Good reach. Bad knees.
“Morning,” my grandfather said.
“Name’s Hub. Hub Gorman.” He winked at my grandfather and called out, “See ya at breakfast, Al.” He had a lazy midwestern drawl that reminded my grandfather of Dean Martin’s.
If Dr. Storch had a reply, my grandfather didn’t catch it. Hub angled his head at the stalls and rolled his eyes in that direction. “Want to watch yourself around that shitbird,” he said cheerfully.
My grandfather didn’t reply. He had an aversion to people who winked at him. The jury was out on Dr. Storch, but he was reasonably sure he would still hate Hub Gorman a week from now. There was nothing to be done or said about it. Bad blood, pissing contests, ongoing feuds, that would all constitute a surrender to Wallkill, every bit as much as would making a friend. Even if he had to serve the full twenty months, my grandfather’s plan was to be always just dropping by.
Gorman stepped toward my grandfather, using the lurch imparted by bad knees as a pretext to push his face in much too close. His breath smelled like a cast-iron skillet.
“Word of advice,” he said, arranging his ugly and genial features into a solemn mask. A pregnant pause followed. My grandfather endured it. “Never let a dentist put you under.”
He shambled out, whistling a few aimless notes. My grandfather went to one of the urinals. The relief of urination helped to mitigate a feeling of foreboding brought on by the interaction of Dr. Storch and Hub Gorman. Dr. Storch came bustling out of the stall.
“There you are!” he said, as if he and my grandfather had become separated while hiking through the woods. “Ready for breakfast?”
They got to the mess hall one minute past seven. Since it was my grandfather’s first breakfast at Wallkill, the guard at the door cut him a break. “Go on, then, you, and get your pancakes,” he said, shoving with his shoulder against one of the swinging doors to let my grandfather in. “Don’t let it happen again, all right?”
After my grandfather went through, the guard stepped into the doorway. The warmth went out of his voice. “You can just go hungry this morning, Doc,” he said.
*
“That’s why you always say that?”
“Say what?”
“‘Never let a dentist put you under,’” I quoted. “That’s what you always say.”
“I do?”
“It’s one of your major pieces of advice.”
“It’s just common sense,” my grandfather said. “I don’t give advice.”
I searched my memory to see if I could contradict him. I found statements on the order of Get the hair dryer away from the bathtub and It will heal faster without a Band-Aid and, of an approaching Doberman, He can smell that you’re afraid.
“So you’re anti-advice,” I said.
“I’m not anti-advice, just there’s no point to it.”
“Okay.”
“They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.”
I was not entirely certain, and thought of asking him, who this they were, pointlessly wasting his time. I decided he was in all likelihood talking about the human race.
“So next time a dentist wants to give me gas, I should just say, ‘Go for it.’”
“Feel free. People die every day in dentist’s chairs.”
“Poor Dr. Storch,” I said. “Did you get a little nicer to him later on?”
“I wasn’t unkind to him. I just didn’t talk to him. I didn’t talk to anybody, and I didn’t want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.”
This did not strike me as necessarily marking a radical change in approach.
“Yeah, but, I mean, that guy Hub was tormenting him for months . . .”
“A year.”
“And then you move in right next door. And you haven’t been there for the whole history of Dr. Storch getting picked on and called a Nazi and treated like shit, even by the guards, who it sounds like were basically decent to the other prisoners.”
“They were more than decent.”
“And you’re, you know, all muscley and tough-looking and whatever. He couldn’t’ve known what a total, like, badass you were. But I bet he was maybe hoping you might want to stick up for him.”
“‘Badass.’” My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again.
“I bet he was hoping you’d be his friend. It sounds like he needed one.”
“He was,” my grandfather said. “He did.”