Three Balconies by Bruce Jay Friedman Page A

argument. The numbers were against him. The wagons were circling. Even Kevin had begun to send him childhood
mementoes, explaining that at sixty-five, it was time to “pare down his life a bit.”
    Dugan’s one consolation was that of all the friends he had lost, there wasn’t one who had a claim on his heart – someone he could call in the middle of the night for a discussion of his darkest fears – of death, for example. Could he survive the loss of such an individual? And then one day he found out, when he learned that Enzo Cavalucci had lost a secret and uncomplaining battle with Mehlman’s Syndrome, something new, a spin-off of Alzheimer’s. (Cavalucci had once joked that it was unwise to catch a disease that had someone’s name attached to it.) When Dugan received the news from Cavalucci’s mistress, he wept into the phone without shame. And when Cavalucci’s widow called later to confirm, he wept again. He had loved his friend, but hadn’t realized to what extent – until it was too late. A rival historian, Cavalucci had enjoyed far greater eminence than Dugan and had even sold his Boer War trilogy to the movies. Cavalucci had gotten rich, but such was Dugan’s love for the man that he hadn’t begrudged him a dime. At a troubled time of his life, Dugan had set out with a lead pipe to kill his first wife’s lover; it was Cavalucci who had gently stayed his hand, saying “You don’t want to do that.” Actually, Dugan did want to do it, but that wasn’t the point. Cavalucci had rescued him from a potential shitstorm. On another occasion, sensing Dugan was in financial difficulty, Cavalucci had wired him $l0,000, along with a note saying there was no rush to pay it back. And if he needed another ten, that could be arranged, too. Dugan barely slept until he had settled the debt, but he never forgot his friend’s kindness. And when Dugan’s Bismarck bio had been raked over the coals, it was Cavalucci who stood up bravely at a gathering of historians and recited selections from the work – focusing on the ones that had suffered the greatest abuse. Cavalucci lived in St. Louis. The two men rarely saw each other, but they spoke regularly on the phone, each conversation picking up seamlessly from the last. Of late, Dugan had noticed a tendency on Cavalucci’s part to lose his
focus on the phone, but he attributed that to a preoccupation with his planned Cardinal Richelieu masterwork.
    In the weeks that followed Cavalucci’s passing, Dugan was inconsolable, and could think of nothing else. Acquaintances were one thing – but the loss of this wise and friendly bear of a man – a rock he could always cling to – was more than he could stand. Dugan’s wife, an independent woman who dabbled in the sale of waterfront property, barely noticed his extended grief. For the time being, Dugan slept in the guest room, which she didn’t notice either. His son trailed him around, hoping his father’s melancholy would pass, then gave up and went outdoors to jump up and down on a lonely trampoline. Work was no longer Dugan’s salvation. How was he supposed to get excited about DeGaulle’s childhood? He sat at his desk, mindlessly reciting the phone number of his boyhood apartment in Jackson Heights, reflecting on his parents, his brothers and sisters, all of them gone except Kevin who was making preparations to join them.
    One day, unaccountably, his spirits came awake. Momentarily cheerful, he reached into his pocket to pay for gas at a service station and pulled out an expensive goatskin credit card holder – a gift from Cavalucci. The sight of it put him right back where he started. At the fish store, the following morning, a woman he barely knew gave him an update on her husband’s condition in a nursing home. “Mel’s incontinent,” she shouted across the shellfish counter. He returned home