Garrison
He has big feet, big hands and arms, a brawny chest, a skewed nose, scarred brow ridges that bulge out above his eyes, marks earned discovering that it's not a world in which Good prevails over Evil. He quit college and enlisted in the Rangers when the Korean War began to emulate his father and grandfather, but instead of being sent to Korea, he was assigned to an intelligence unit in Berlin, where he felt like a cop assigned to policing men’s rooms. After the service he started a debt collection business and became expert at cold-bloodedly liquidating failing businesses. He quit that to write about his father and grandfather. He is married to Diana whom he worshipped all through high school. He wants to preserve his father and grandfather’s line by having children, but he and Diana are childless and she has begun to see him as a failure, socially, financially, sexually.
Diana
Born Drita Ljubica, her father is from Albania and collects disability for a faked back injury. Her mother, born in Poland, cleans offices. After a year at Wellesley she changed her name to Diana Stark and her appearance from the Madonna Garrison had worshipped in high school to a Vogue model look-alike. She tells people that her mother is Irish and her father French Canadian. She shuns them both and chooses as friends people to whom she can feel socially superior.
She started the Art History Department of Colepool Publishers where she is the only woman and youngest member of the company’s Operating Committee. She wants children, but does not wish to take time out from her job to have them. She out-earns Garrison and feels she has outgrown him too. But then things change at Colepool.
Garrison’s father
Stoic, pessimistic, scrupulously honest and ethical, he is the son of a Civil War hero. He got his medical degree in 1912, served during World War I as a surgeon in the Meuse-Argonne campaign and married late. His wife, much younger than he, left him when Garrison was twelve.
Once head of Obstetrics at the elite Riverside Medical Center, he is now eighty, retired, and lives alone in the eight-room apartment where Garrison grew up. He has fallen into debt. His own father died of intestinal bleeding. He helped him die with dignity by giving him drops. Now he has begun to bleed from the intestines, and is asking Garrison to help him die with dignity.
Carnusty
Sloping cheeks, narrow mouth, intense blue eyes, tiny black-light pupils. Always on parade and attractive to women--especially those you’d think would know better. His father was janitor of the house Diana lived in while going to high school and Garrison suspects he was once Diana’s lover.
“My old lady wore a house dress and hair curlers. She was a slob. Get up at night to take a leak, the sink was always fulla dishes.”
“We were kids, a broad gave you her cherry? Your name was carved on her ass. She'd never leave you. Today? They use the fuck like a credit card.”
“Only thing counts is spreading your genes. Your genes're there, you're there; they're gone, you're gone. Ivan the Terrible left a thousand bastards when he died. There's a guy's going to live forever!”
Herm Wolf, President of Kensington Typewriters
Began as a salesman before World War II when Kensington typewriters had over fifty per cent of the market. He wants to bring back those glory days. A short man with white hair, pitted cheeks, and absolute zero eyes, he’s obviously the alpha-hound of the kennel. The vice presidents jump up and stand at attention when he enters. They wag their tails, lick their lips and stoop to get down to his height. There’s an animal look on his face. The pupils of his eyes are chunks of coal inside lumps of ice--not the eyes of a man who’s had multiple heart attacks. He was a bomber pilot during World War II and Korea.
He speaks in decrees and at national sales meetings always fires the poorest performers, execution style, in public at the welcoming cocktail party. He roams the floor pouring down scotch as if loading himself with nitroglycerine before he walks up to his victim. His legs stiffen, he bares his stumpy teeth and strikes. It’s a dog attack.
Marty Berk, President of Golden Wand
A short man in double-breasted suit, elevated shoes and a toupee, he swaggers about as if twelve inches taller than his actual height.
“He swerved his tomato-red Cadillac convertible into the breakdown lane, flashed his brights, passed a mile-long line of trucks and cars backed up at the tolls, cut in front of a sixteen wheeler carrying chickens. The trucker stomped his brake and jerked his horn cord. Berk pressed a button, rolled down his window, took a ticket, raised his middle finger to the chicken truck and sped away.”
"Macy’s got thirteen toasters on display. Tornado got three. They leave um in boxes and stack the boxes. You want to see toasters, go to Macy's. You want to buy toasters, come to Tornado. Bring cash! Like the looters in Harlem! Reach in, grab the merchandise, haul it away on your hip! That's the feeling you try ta convey."They reached the typewriter stacks. Berk shook his head at the plain, brown paperboard Kensington boxes. "Look at my box. Four colors! A carrying handle! It says 'Pick me up! Take me home! Turn your moron son into the smartest kid in his class!' Your box says, 'Don't buy me, I'm too ugly. Go buy a hairdryer.'
“I grew up in the Bronx we had six kids, one bathroom. Now I live in Glen Cove. I got one kid and six bathrooms.”
See The Locations
Kensington Scott Building.
Joe Scott, CEO of Scott Dynamics acquired Kensington in 1962 to get the computer business and cut his company’s dependence on DOD business. For six months, he was Wall Street's latest genius. Then he had a bad quarter. Now Kensington’s typewriters are obsolete, and the Computer Division’s losses are mounting.
Scott likes to think he still knows everyone in his company. He doesn't. And that his company, inherited from his father, is still one happy family. It isn't. Under pressure from Wall Street and his board to sell the typewriter business and make the Computer Division profitable, he takes Wolf to Toots Shor’s to break the news. He pays the waiter with cash. He doesn't believe in credit cards.
Riverside Drive
Built during the 1920’s during the tax abatement on real estate improvements, the apartment buildings on Riverside Drive, West End and Central Park are the best built in New York City. Garrison grew up here in the 1930’s and early forties. He has happy memories of the days before his mother left his father. Now the neighborhood has deteriorated but Garrison persuades Diana to move into his father’s eight-room apartment, hoping he'll be happy there again.
Brooklyn Heights
These stately buildings, built during the nineteenth century, face onto Columbia Heights. Their rear windows and balconies look out above the Promenade and the old Grace Line docks across the East River at the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and at the Brooklyn Bridge.
Diana’s friends, Richard and Simone Du Browe own this building. Like Diana and Garrison, they are childless, but in their case, because they don’t wish to bring children into the world as it is. Instead, they surround themselves with antique furniture, old engravings and modern paintings. They give frequent parties and serve excellent wine. Richard owns an art gallery on Madison. Simone, a talented painter, has abruptly stopped painting. Richard’s father, born Dubrowsky, changed his name to Dubrow on coming to America in 1910. Richard, after studying at the Sorbonne where he met Simone, altered it to Du Browe. Simone’s father lives in a deteriorating family castle outside Vienna. He hasn’t spoken to Simone since she married Richard.
{Building images courtesy of the New York Public Library}