Free American Pastoral by Philip Roth

the team we three played on in the playground softball league, and, according to the biographical listing in the reunion booklet, a "Financial Consultant" and, too (unlikely as it seemed when I remembered that, paralyzingly shy of girls, babyfaced Mutty had made pitching pennies his major adolescent diversion), progenitor of "Children 36,34, 31. Grandchildren 2,1"—"I told Mutty," Mendy said, "that if he didn't sit next to me I wasn't coming. I had to deal with the real goons in my business. Dealt with the fucking Mob. But this I could not deal with from day one. Not twice, Skip,
three
times I had to stop the car to take a crap."
    "Well," I said, "after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent."
    "Is that it?"
    "Maybe. Who knows."
    "Twenty kids dead in our class." He showed me at the back of the booklet the page headed "In Memoriam." "Eleven of the guys dead," Mendy said. "
Two
from the Daredevils. Bert Bergman. Utty Orenstein." Utty was Mutty's battery mate, Bert played second base. "Prostate cancer. The both of them. And both in the last three years. I get the blood test. I get it every six months since I heard about Utty. You get the test?"
    "I get it." Of course, I didn't any longer because I no longer had a prostate.
    "How often?"
    "Every year."
    "Not enough," he told me. "Every six months."
    "Okay. I'll do that."
    "You been all right though?" he asked, taking hold of me by the shoulders.
    "I'm in good shape," I said.
    "Hey, I taught you to jerk off, you know that?"
    "That you did, Mendel. Anywhere from ninety to a hundred twenty days before I would have happened upon it myself. You're the one who got me going."
    "I'm the guy," he said, laughing loudly, "who taught Skip Zuckerman to jerk off. My claim to fame," and we embraced, the bald first baseman and white-haired left fielder of the dwindling Daredevil Athletic Club. The torso I could feel through his clothes attested to just how well he did take care of himself.
    "I'm still at it," Mendy said happily. "Fifty years later. A Daredevil record."
    "Don't be so sure," I said. "Check with Mutty."
    "I heard you had a heart attack," he said.
    "No, just a bypass. Years ago."
    "The fucking bypass. They stick that tube down your throat, don't they?"
    "They do."
    "I saw my brother-in-law with the tube down his throat. That's all I need," Mendy said. "I didn't want to be here in the worst fucking way, but Mutty keeps calling and saying, 'You're not going to live forever,' and I keep telling him, 'I
am,
Mutt. I have to!' Then I'm schmuck enough to come, and the first thing I see when I open up this booklet is obituaries."
    When Mendy went off to get a drink and find Mutty, I looked for his name in the booklet: "Retired Restaurateur. Children 36, 33, 28. Grandchildren 14, 12, 9, 5, 5, 3." I wondered if the six grandchildren, including what appeared to be a set of twins, were what made Mendy so fearful of death or if there were other reasons, like reveling still in whores and sharp clothes. I should have asked him.

    I should have asked people a lot of things that afternoon. But later, though regretting that I hadn't, I understood that to have gotten answers to any of my questions beginning "Whatever happened to..." would not have told me why I had the uncanny sense that what goes on
behind
what we see is what I was seeing. It didn't take more than one of the girls' saying to the photographer, the instant before he snapped the class photo, "Be sure and leave the wrinkles out," didn't take more than laughing along with everyone else at the nicely timed wisecrack, to feel that Destiny, the most ancient enigma of the civilized world—and our first composition topic in freshman Greek and Roman Mythology, where I wrote "the Fates are three goddesses, called the Moerae, Clotho who spins, Lachesis who determines its length, and Atropos who cuts the thread of life"—Destiny had become perfectly understandable