The Spectator Bird Read Free Page B

nose and pushing away the cane that he held up in my face. The thing looked as if it might smell. “Couldn’t you at least have left it out in the sun to bleach?” I said. “That’s an awful brown untoothsome-looking bone.”
    â€œThat’s a sound bone. When I saw it I was proud, by God. Look at it. No spurs, no decalcification, no nothing. Except for that fall, it would have lasted me a lifetime.”
    The white convertible eased into sight around the corner of the hill by Hammonds’. “Here comes Edith,” I said. “Do I act as if I know?”
    He considered only a second. “I wouldn’t. If it was me, I wouldn’t hide it But she’s like you, she’d rather go off by herself and grit her teeth.”
    She pulled up, impassive behind the glasses, her flat cheeks looking deceptively young, her mouth fixed in the usual expression of remote and forgiving amusement. Ben opened the door, she slid over, he got in and threw the cane into the back seat “Think about it,” he said. “I’ll call you for lunch one of these days.” They lifted their hands and drove off, and I sat down again on the bridge timbers.
    I don’t respond gladly when other people show a willingness to direct my life, routines, or feelings. Ben has a way of making me feel about fifteen years old, an age that appeals to me even less than sixty-nine. He never doubted himself in his life. He is one of those people, insufferable when you think about them, who have always been able to do exactly what they set out to do. The son of a China missionary, he came to California without a dollar, determined to become a doctor. He became one, a very good one, some people think a great one. Even yet, when he has all but quit practicing, people come from a long way off to be treated by him. He has doctored everybody from Admiral Nimitz to Angela Davis, he has more celebrities in his files than I have, and on more intimate terms. I have only read their manuscripts and taken them to lunch and prepared their contracts and advanced them money and bailed them out of difficulties. He has examined their prostates, or the equivalent.
    Wanting money, he made it, made two or three million dollars. And give him credit, he practices what he preaches. When he built his big house in six hundred acres of foothills he didn’t retire, he pulled the world out to him. It is about as secluded as Vandenberg Air Force Base. Two or three nights a week his Chinese couple serve dinner to twenty or so people, the kind of people who have been everywhere and done everything. From his little vineyard Ben makes every year a thousand bottles of extraordinary Cabernet Sauvignon. He is a director in a half dozen Peninsula electronics firms, he has served on a half dozen presidential commissions, he owns vineyards in Sonoma and ranches in Mendocino County, and he collects things—friends, books, money, limericks, dirty stories—the way an air filter collects lint.
    Also, I was thinking as I sat on my splintery 8×8 beam, he is one of the few men I know thoughtful enough to go down with Edith Patterson while she received her husband’s death sentence, or take a few minutes to read the lab tests of Joe Allston, a crybaby former patient, and make a special trip out to calm his mind.
    Grit my teeth, did I? The hell I did. I complained by withdrawal and irritability and silence. Ten minutes with Ben Alexander and I was resolving to quit being a sissy about growing old.
    Eventually the mailman’s red, white, and blue truck came in, and the mailman, as cheerful as if he had been on time, handed me out a little bundle. Most of the letters, as usual, were addressed to Boxholder or Resident. Those that were not seemed to be appeals. That is another symptom of retirementitis, the way the mail decreases in amount and significance. I put the bundle in my right-hand pocket and walked back up the lane, reading as I