GRAMPS FORD, his chin resting on his
hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the
five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news
commentator was summarizing the day's happenings. Every thirty seconds or so,
Gramps would jab the floor with his cane-tip and shout, "Hell, we did that
a hundred years ago!"
Emerald
and Lou, coming in from the balcony, where they had been seeking that 2185 A.D.
rarity—privacy—were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou's father
and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and
wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife,
grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and
wife—and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All save Gramps,
who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to
be about the same age—somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties.
Gramps looked older because he had already reached 70 when anti-gerasone was
invented. He had not aged in the 102 years since.
"Meanwhile,"
the commentator was saying, "Council Bluffs, Iowa, was still threatened by
stark tragedy. But 200 weary rescue workers have refused to give up hope, and
continue to dig in an effort to save Elbert Haggedorn, 183, who has been wedged
for two days in a ..."
"I
wish he'd get something more cheerful," Emerald whispered to Lou.
"SILENCE!" cried
Gramps. "Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV's on is gonna find
hisself cut off without a dollar—" his voice suddenly softened and
sweetened—"when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis
Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip Up Yonder."
He
sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making
the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had
been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day
for fifty years.
"Dr.
Brainard Keyes Bullard," continued the commentator, "President of
Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world's ills can
be traced to the fact that Man's knowledge of himself has not kept pace with
his knowledge of the physical world."
"Hell!"
snorted Gramps. "We said that a hundred years ago!"
"In
Chicago tonight," the commentator went on, "a special celebration is
taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honor is Lowell W.
Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is the twenty-five-millionth child to
be born in the hospital." The commentator faded, and was replaced on the
screen by young Hitz, who squalled furiously.
"Hell!"
whispered Lou to Emerald. "We said that a hundred years ago."
"I
heard that!" shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set and his
petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. "You, there,
boy—"
"I
didn't mean anything by it, sir," said Lou, aged 103.
"Get
me my will. You know where it is. You kids all know where it
is. Fetch, boy!" Gramps snapped his gnarled fingers sharply.
Lou
nodded dully and found himself going down the hall, picking his way over
bedding to Gramps' room, the only private room in the Ford apartment. The other
rooms were the bathroom, the living room and the wide windowless hallway, which
was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette
in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway
and living room, and the daybed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh
couple, the favorites of the moment.
On
Gramps' bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated and blotched with
hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice and
homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all
jammed onto two sheets—a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife.
This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take
him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share
in the estate. To say nothing of the daybed in the living room for Em and
himself.
"Boy!"
called Gramps.
"Coming,
sir." Lou hurried back into the living room and handed Gramps the will.
"Pen!"
said Gramps.
HE was instantly offered
eleven pens, one from each couple.
"Not that leaky
thing," he said, brushing Lou's pen aside. "Ah, there's a
nice one. Good boy, Willy." He accepted Willy's pen. That was the tip they
had all been waiting for. Willy, then—Lou's father—was the new favorite.
Willy,
who looked almost as young as Lou, though he was 142, did a poor job of
concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become
his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back
to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.
Gramps
missed none of the high drama he had authored and he gave his own familiar role
everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though
he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep portentous
monotone, like a bass note on a cathedral organ.
"I,
Harold D. Ford, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New York City,
Connecticut, do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and
Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time
heretofore made." He blew his nose importantly and went on, not missing a
word, and repeating many for emphasis—repeating in particular his
ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.
At the
end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought
he might have forgotten why he'd brought out the will in the first place. But
Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control and, after erasing
for a full minute, began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have
spoken his lines for him, he had heard them so often.
"I
have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better
land," Gramps said and wrote. "But the deepest hurt of all has been
dealt me by—" He looked around the group, trying to remember who the
malefactor was.
Everyone
looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly.
Gramps
nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence—"my great-grandson, Louis J.
Ford."
"Grandson,
sir," said Lou.
"Don't
quibble. You're in deep enough now, young man," said Gramps, but he made
the change. And, from there, he went without a misstep through the phrasing of
the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.
IN the paragraph
following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room at one time
or another, Lou's name was scratched out and Willy's substituted as heir to the
apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom.
"So!"
said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will and
substituted a new one, including the time of day. "Well—time to watch the
McGarvey Family." The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps
had been following since he was 60, or for a total of 112 years. "I can't
wait to see what's going to happen next," he said.
Lou
detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom
door. Wishing Em would join him, he wondered where she was.
He dozed
for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone stepping over him to get
into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though
something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his
mind that Em had cracked up, that she was in there doing something drastic
about Gramps.
"Em?"
he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the
door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second,
then let the door swing inward.
"Morty!"
gasped Lou.
Lou's
great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to
the Ford menage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked
the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand—Gramps'
enormous economy-size bottle of anti-gerasone, which had apparently been
half-emptied, and which Morty was refilling with tap water.
A moment
later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou and brushed past him wordlessly
to rejoin his pretty bride.
Shocked,
Lou didn't know what to do. He couldn't let Gramps take the mousetrapped
anti-gerasone—but, if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps would certainly make
life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing.
Lou
glanced into the living room and saw that the Fords, Emerald among them, were
momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveys had made of their lives.
Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, locked the door as well as he could and
began to pour the contents of Gramps' bottle down the drain. He was going to
refill it with full-strength anti-gerasone from the 22 smaller bottles on the
shelf.
The
bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou
that the emptying would take forever. And the almost imperceptible smell of
anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness,
to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment, through the keyhole and under
the door.
THE bottle gurgled
monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living room and
there were murmurs and the scraping of chair-legs on the floor. "Thus
ends," said the television announcer, "the 29,121st chapter in the
life of your neighbors and mine, the McGarveys." Footsteps were coming
down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door.
"Just
a sec," Lou cheerily called out. Desperately, he shook the big bottle,
trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy
bottle smashed on the tile floor.
The door
was pushed open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at the incriminating mess.
Lou felt
a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of his neck. He grinned
engagingly through his nausea and, for want of anything remotely resembling a
thought, waited for Gramps to speak.
"Well,
boy," said Gramps at last, "looks like you've got a little tidying up
to do."
And that
was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd and locked
himself in his bedroom.
The Fords
contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, and then hurried back
to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too,
if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a
quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he also went into the living room, leaving only
Emerald standing in the doorway.
Tears
streamed over her cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb—please don't look
so awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging about
Gramps."
"No,"
said Lou, finding his voice, "really you didn't. Honest, Em, I was
just—"
"You
don't have to explain anything to me, hon. I'm on your side, no matter
what." She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, "It
wouldn't have been murder, hon. It wouldn't have killed him. It wasn't such a
terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he'd be able to go any
time God decided He wanted him."
"What's
going to happen next, Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's he going to
do?"
LOU and Emerald stayed
fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Gramps was going to do.
But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. Two hours before dawn, they
finally dropped off to sleep.
At six o'clock,
they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the
kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but
their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed
two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender
their places to their son's generation.
Then, as
was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began
preparing Gramps' breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on
a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was
having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine, on which
Gramps spent so much of the income from his fortune.
"Well,"
said Emerald, "I'm not going to get all panicky until I'm sure there's
something to be panicky about."
"Maybe
he doesn't know what it was I busted," Lou said hopefully.
"Probably
thinks it was your watch crystal," offered Eddie, their son, who was
toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.
"Don't
get sarcastic with your father," said Em, "and don't talk with your
mouth full, either."
"I'd
like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say
something," complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock.
"It's time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know."
"Yeah,
it is, isn't it?" said Lou weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have the tray,
Em."
"We'll
both go."
Walking
slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle of long-faced Fords
standing around the bedroom door.
Em
knocked. "Gramps," she called brightly, "break-fast
is rea-dy."
There was
no reply and she knocked again, harder.
The door
swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide,
canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Ford, was empty.
A sense
of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the
Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to
search gingerly, under the furniture and behind the drapes, for all that was
mortal of Gramps, father of the clan.
BUT Gramps had left not
his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a
paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the World's Fair of 2000.
Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:
"'Somebody
who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these
years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or
tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden
of life as I once could. So, after last night's bitter experience, I say
good-by. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns and
I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.'"
"Gosh,"
said Willy brokenly, "he didn't even get to see how the 5000-mile Speedway
Race was going to come out."
"Or
the Solar Series," Eddie said, with large mournful eyes.
"Or
whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back," added Morty.
"There's
more," said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: "'I, Harold D.
Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and
Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time
heretofore made.'"
"No!"
cried Willy. "Not another one!"
"'I
do stipulate,'" read Lou, "'that all of my property, of whatsoever
kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in
common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share
alike.'"
"Issue?"
said Emerald.
Lou
included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. "It means we all own the
whole damn shootin' match."
Each eye
turned instantly to the bed.
"Share
and share alike?" asked Morty.
"Actually,"
said Willy, who was the oldest one present, "it's just like the old
system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here
and—"
"I
like that!" exclaimed Em. "Lou owns as much of it as you
do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who's still working. You can
snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poor Lou
stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and—"
"How
about letting somebody who's never had any privacy get a
little crack at it?" Eddie demanded hotly. "Hell, you old people had
plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle
of that goddamn barracks in the hall! How about—"
"Yeah?"
challenged Morty. "Sure, you've all had it pretty tough, and my heart
bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick."
"Silence!"
shouted Willy imperiously. "The next person who opens his mouth spends the
next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to
think."
A vase
shattered against the wall, inches above his head.
IN the next moment, a
free-for-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other
couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the
lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the
hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into
the room.
After two
hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in,
followed by television cameramen from mobile units.
For the
next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords, and then the
apartment was still and spacious.
An hour
later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000
delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.
In the
stillness of the three-room Ford apartment on the 76th floor of Building 257,
the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the
cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the
loudspeaker.
The
battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station,
where the Fords and their captors watched with professional interest.
Em and
Lou, in adjacent four-by-eight cells, were stretched out peacefully on their
cots.
"Em,"
called Lou through the partition, "you got a washbasin all your own,
too?"
"Sure.
Washbasin, bed, light—the works. And we thought Gramps' room
was something. How long has this been going on?" She held out her hand.
"For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven't got the shakes—look at
me!"
"Cross
your fingers," said Lou. "The lawyer's going to try to get us a
year."
"Gee!"
Em said dreamily. "I wonder what kind of wires you'd have to pull to get
put away in solitary?"
"All
right, pipe down," said the turnkey, "or I'll toss the whole kit and
caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how
good jail is ain't never getting back in!"
The
prisoners instantly fell silent.
THE living room of the
apartment darkened for a moment as the riot scenes faded on the television
screen, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the Sun coming from
behind a cloud. "And now, friends," he said, "I have a special
message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over 150.
Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration
or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone
was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel
different and out of things.
"After
years of research, medical science has now developed Super-anti-gerasone!
In weeks—yes, weeks—you can look, feel and act as young as your
great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn't you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from
everybody else? Well, you don't have to. Safe, tested Super-anti-gerasone
costs you only a few dollars a day.
"Write
now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar
postcard, and mail it to 'Super,' Box 500,000, Schenectady, N. Y. Have
you got that? I'll repeat it. 'Super,' Box 500,000 ..."
Underlining
the announcer's words was the scratching of Gramps' pen, the one Willy had
given him the night before. He had come in, a few minutes earlier, from the
Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building 257 from across the square
of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to
come straighten the place up, then had hired the best lawyer in town to get his
descendants a conviction, a genius who had never gotten a client less than a
year and a day. Gramps had then moved the daybed before the television screen,
so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he'd dreamed
of doing for years.
"Schen-ec-ta-dy,"
murmured Gramps. "Got it!" His face had changed remarkably. His
facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under
what had been taut lines of bad temper. It was almost as though his trial
package of Super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When something
amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to
lengthen the thin line of his mouth a millimeter.
Life was
good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next.
—KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
