It was an exaggeration, but I didn’t object. It was the first time I had heard myself described as a “dirty old man,” but I merely took it to mean that I was over forty and liked women, and that I showed that liking every chance I got. Since this is all true, I am perfectly willing to bear the title; I even use it on myself without qualms.

  7

  On July 20, I returned to Newton, and that evening, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin successfully walked on the Moon. I was enthralled, as was the whole world.

  I couldn’t help but remember that in “Trends,” written three decades before, I had had the first Moon flights (without an actual landing) take place in 1975 and 1978. Reality had outstripped me by a full decade, and the real thing was far more complex and detailed than my fictional descriptions.

  8

  On July 25,173 my typewriter had broken down. By now I had two Selectric typewriters, having traded in the older model with the shifting carriage as unusable once I got used to the dancing walnut.

  It was a Friday, and it happened right after the close of the business day, which meant that I would have to wait till Monday morning to get IBM to send a repairman. Had it been my only typewriter I would have been very unhappy, but as it was, I merely moved the ailing typewriter into the other room, brought in the backup typewriter, and continued working. I felt a little uneasy at having only one working typewriter, but it was only for the weekend.

  But on Saturday (our twenty-seventh anniversary) the second typewriter broke down also, and I went completely wild. To have invested over a thousand dollars in two typewriters and to have them both collapse on me simultaneously and on a weekend. Well, it just seemed too much.

  It was with difficulty that I restored myself to near sanity and, that evening, with nothing else to do, I took the family to dinner and a movie. Coming out of the movie, we encountered Carl and Linda Sagan in the lobby. He was just out of the hospital after seven weeks, and I had to admit that there were misadventures worse than malfunctioning typewriters, and I was rather ashamed of myself.

  On Monday, July 28, first thing in the morning, I finally managed to get in touch with IBM. The people there knew me and knew very well the intensity of my devotion to work and the level of my anxiety about the welfare of my typewriters. When the IBM man at the repair desk heard that both my typewriters were out, he at once swore that he would have someone at my place within the hour, and I thanked him brokenly.

  In less than an hour, the bell sounded at the front door and I bounded down the stairs with gladness and relief.

  What I had totally forgotten was that several days before I had made arrangements to have Israel Shenker, a feature writer of the New York Times, visit me for an interview, and when I threw the door open, there he was with his wife.

  He introduced himself and I stared at him blankly for a moment, unable to absorb anything other than the fact that the IBM man wasn’t there. Then I remembered and said grumpily, “Oh it’s you!” which is scarcely the right way to greet an influential reporter.

  I took them up to my office and for a couple of hours they interviewed me while I grew more and more restless because the repairman did not come. I had to excuse myself and try to call IBM now and then, but the line was always busy and it was all I could do not to break down right in front of Shenker. Naturally, I had to explain all my typewriter troubles to him. I could no more have refrained from doing that than I could have refrained from sneezing if my nose tickled.

  By the time the Shenkers had left, the repairman had still not come and, in fact, he did not arrive till 1:00 p.m. What had happened was that he had gotten his directions mixed and had gone to a street of the same name as ours in Brookline.

  Once in my office, of course, he fixed both typewriters in a very short time and all was well. I cooled down at once and even felt guilty over the bitter remarks I had made to Shenker concerning lousy service, because, actually, this was the first time that an IBM repairman had not come instantly on being summoned.

  9

  On July 30, I received my Doubleday statement, and the check came to nearly forty thousand dollars. At last, after eight years of steadily building royalties, Doubleday had surpassed that check from Basic Books.

  I had made enormous progress in a decade. That one check was greater than my entire annual income for 1960.

  10

  Meanwhile, the Brandeis summer course was beginning and I was again involved, though not quite to the extent of the previous year. I was, however, due for an evening talk on August 6.

  Gertrude would not be there for that talk. She would be attending the first week, but then she and Robyn would be going to Great Britain and I would be doing the second week alone. Actually, I rather looked forward to being alone in the house for three weeks, with a chance of getting enormous quantities of work done.

  On Saturday, August 2, at 2:00 p.m., I drove Gertrude, Robyn, and the Hirts, with all their baggage, to the airport and left them there. At 6:45 p.m., Gertrude called from Kennedy Airport, where they were scheduled to take a plane across the Atlantic.

  11

  The next day, August 3, the Sunday New York Times ran the Lewis Nichols interview of me, the one that had been done the previous April. It took up a full page in the Book Review Section and was very good. What particularly pleased me was that toward the end he included a tribute I had paid my father for buying me a new typewriter even before I had made my first sale, as his evidence of faith in my perseverance and ability.

  I promptly called my parents in Florida to ask if they had seen the Times yet. They hadn’t, and my mother, who answered the phone, said my father wasn’t feeling well. I asked to speak to him and he seemed annoyed at my mother for having overdramatized the situation.

  He said, “So I have pains. I have pains all the time now; and I’ve had it for years. Sometimes it’s a little worse, sometimes a little better, and finally I’ll die. So what? When I die, I die.”

  “Yes, Pappa,” I said, “but how do you feel now?”

  “Not so bad. She’s just making a fuss. I’ll send her out for the Times. That will give her something to do.”

  Later on in the day, he called me. They had obtained the Times, read the article, and my father was very pleased. Of course, he did his best not to be sickening about it, since he always prided himself on his stoical approach to life,174 but he rarely fooled me.

  That night, I attended the opening banquet of the second week of the Brandeis summer course, and all was well and hilarious.

  12

  On Monday, August 4, 1969, things fell apart.

  At 8:45 p.m. that evening I was on the phone and the operator broke in to tell me that someone else was trying to reach me on a life-and-death emergency. There were three things it could be: Gertrude and Robyn, David, or my mother and father.

  Stupidly, turning cold all over, I said, “Life and death?”

  I heard my brother’s voice break in, “Tell him it’s Stanley calling.”

  That meant my mother and father. I broke off my conversation, was connected to Stanley, and I said, “What’s the matter?”

  It was a useless question. I knew what had happened.

  That afternoon, my father had died, a little less than a year after he had gone to Florida. That day of the golden wedding anniversary celebration was, after all, the last time I was ever to see him.

  At least I had spoken to him the day before. He had indeed felt poorly then. He felt worse on the morning of the fourth, was taken to the hospital, and died there in a matter of hours.

  He was seventy-two-years and seven months old at the time of death, and had survived the onset of his angina pectoris by thirty-one years. He had remained mentally alert to the very end and was never bedridden till the last day. It was a source of great solace to me that on his last full day of life I had spoken to him (and so had Stanley, in connection with the Times article) and that he himself had read the article and had seen that I had appreciated what he had done for me and that I had let the world know.

  I was grateful then, and have always been since, to Lewis Nichols for the excellent article he wrote and to the chance that made it appear the day before my father’s death, rather than the day after.

  13

  It did not occur to me for a moment to try to get in touch with Gertrude and Robyn in Europe and get them to come home. It would have been a silly and heartless thing to do, and I do not believe that death should interfere with life.

  If, by disrupting their vacation, Gertrude and Robyn could have restored my father to life, I would have them disrupt it at once—but to disrupt it merely for useless ritual? Never! Nor did I bother David.

  On August 5, I drove to New York, for Stanley had had our father’s body brought to Long Island for burial on the sixth. The services were extremely simple and my brother and I, quite deliberately, eschewed all ceremony.175 Stanley wouldn’t even look at the body, maintaining that our father was alive only in our memories and in the consequences of the deeds he had done. The body that had been our father in life, he said, was nothing in death. I agreed with him intellectually—but I took a last look.

  My mother was not present because she was still in Miami Beach, having been hospitalized as a result of the shock of my father’s death, and Ruth was with her. Marcia and Nick were away on vacation and we didn’t know where they were, so we couldn’t reach them. All the children were deliberately kept away.

  But then, unexpectedly, Larry Ashmead walked in. He had taken the trouble to find out where the services were, and had made the trip. The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do, and this was characteristic of Larry.

  My father’s body was then taken to a cemetery lot he had long ago bought out on Long Island, and Stanley, I, and the rabbi went out, following the ambulance, to hold vigil over the interment.

  It pleased me that Stanley and I carried enough weight for the death of our father to be commemorated in small obituaries in the various metropolitan area newspapers. Could my father have imagined, when he arrived in the new land, fifty-four years before, that his death would make the newspapers?

  There was one unpleasant result of the obituaries. Marcia returned from her vacation the next day and, before we could reach her and break the news to her carefully, some casual acquaintance, learning of the death from the newspapers, expressed her sympathy. That was Marcia’s first knowledge of the death, and it was a bad blow.

  After the funeral, I raced back to Brandeis University. When Stanley had called me with the news of my father’s death and the suggestion I come to New York, I had said, dazedly, “But I’ve a talk to deliver on the sixth.”

  “Break it,” he said.

  “I can’t break a commitment,” I said, still dazed. “I never have.” “You’ve never had a father die,” said Stanley, coldly.

  So I canceled. They understood. Yet even so I raced back, hoping that I might make the talk and spare myself the disgrace of a cancellation, however impeccable the reason. (Another thought, too: Giving the talk would enable me to include an encomium on my father, and I desperately wanted to do that.)

  I did get back in time, but a replacement speaker had been selected, and I couldn’t upset that.176 I was in the audience when my replacement gave his talk, and ended by announcing that he would not accept the four-hundred-dollar fee the talk carried but would donate it to Brandeis to establish a Judah Asimov Scholarship Fund. Grateful (for I would not have had the brains to think of that independently), I rose to match the sum. Others contributed various sums, so that in the end nearly twelve hundred dollars was in the fund.

  Ever since then, I have maintained the fund with an annual payment so that my father’s name from year to year is attached to the helping of some deserving student. It pleases me that my father, who had so much difficulty seeing to the education of his children—but who managed to the full extent of his abilities—should be involved in such education for others after his death.

  It would be nice for me to think he is somewhere in heaven, looking down and feeling proud and pleased, but I do not think so. I do not believe in existence after death, but I am still alive, and I feel proud and pleased.

  14

  The death of my father seemed to sensitize me to the manner in which my life seemed to be falling apart. Gertrude and I had been talking divorce, and when she left for Great Britain there seemed to be some feeling that when she came back we would take serious steps in that direction. The prospect seemed dank enough in itself, but with my father dead, it seemed more than I could live through.

  During the day, I worked steadily and grimly on the Shakespeare book, and that helped anesthetize me, but the nights were dreadful.

  And on the night of August 10–11, having fallen asleep at last, I woke at 2:00 a.m. with the old, familiar abdominal pain. It was the first kidney-stone attack of consequence I had had since 1962 and the worst since the first diagnosed attack in 1950.

  I sat up in bed, rocking back and forth, then out of bed when sitting proved impossible, tottering back and forth with both hands pressing my abdomen, dizzy with pain and conscious of the fact that I was alone in the house. There was no one to call for an ambulance, and if it got worse, I might possibly be unable to call one for myself.

  I am frequently sorry for myself—who is immune to that?—but I don’t think I have ever been sorrier for myself than that night; at least, at those moments when the pain didn’t make even self-pity impossible.

  After a couple of hours, though, the pain slowly died and I got a couple of more hours of exhausted sleep before waking and driving into town, utterly worn out, in order to have my first upper left molar fitted for a crown. It was the first time I had ever had to have a crown.

  Without the kidney-stone pain in the way, I had full scope for self-pity. It was not just my father dead—my kidney stone—the dentist’s chair. In the nine days since Gertrude and Robyn had left, I had heard nothing from them. Gertrude had difficulty writing letters, I knew, but Robyn had promised to write. Had something happened to them?

  15

  That was the low point. When I got back to the house, there was a postcard from Robyn dated the fourth, and she was all right. (The next day there arrived a letter dated the eighth, and everything was still all right.)

  Then, too, on August 11, I heard from Janet Jeppson.

  August was the traditional vacation month for psychiatrists, and Janet was vacationing in New England. She called me to ask after my health.

  What she didn’t know was that Gertrude was away, that I was alone, that my father was dead and my kidney stone alive, and that I was desperate for something to do to keep myself from drowning in self-pity.

  I suggested lunch, and she agreed. After lunch, I suggested that we park one of our cars in my garage and do a little touring together in the other car. She agreed again and through perfect summer weather, we went up to Concord, visited historical sites and, in particular, wandered through the cemetery to look at the graves of Emerson, Thoreau, and others.

  It was wonderful. The smallest things pleased Janet—the graves—the names—the flowers and bushes—the stores we passed. Everything animated her and she seemed to think that I was responsible for it all—for the weather—for the smooth working of the car.

  I was so ravished at the thought that I was making someone happy that I was perfectly willing to accept all the credit. Nor did I tell her of my kidney-stone attack of the previous night, lest the apprehension that the pain return cast a damper on her happiness. Every once in a while I would remember and fear that some twinge might force me to grimace and give me away—but it didn’t.

  We spent all afternoon together, then had dinner. I persuaded her to stay another day, picked her up the next morning, and visited Salem and Marblehead, looking at old houses and old streets and finding quaint places in which to eat.

  It was a marvelous two days; two days without a care; two days in which everything I did seemed right and in which I got instant feedback of pleasure and happiness from someone in whom I was trying to induce pleasure and happiness.

  And it came when most I needed it. The pain of my father’s death seemed soothed, and the expectation of the pain of my kidney stone seemed muted, and, with Robyn’s letters also having arrived, the fears for disaster in Europe seemed deflated.

  It put me right back on the track. When Janet went on her way on August 13, I could go down to New York, quite my old self.

  16

  My purpose in visiting New York was to tape a segment of a David Frost talk show. Some days earlier I had been called by one of the staff of the show who wanted to discuss possible lines of questioning. It was at a time when I was concerned with my father’s death and I was not my usual tactful self.

  I snapped out, “I have no time for that, sir. Just tell Mr. Frost he can ask anything he chooses. I will keep up with him, never fear.”

  I suppose that put Frost on his mettle. When I came out on the stage, on August 15, bowing and smiling and seating myself with an attitude of being completely at my ease, he said, with neither warning nor preamble,

  “Dr. Asimov, do you believe in God?”

  That rather took my breath away. It was a dreadful way of putting a person on the spot. To answer honestly, “No,” with millions of people watching, could arouse a great deal of controversy I didn’t feel much need of. Yet I couldn’t lie, either. I played for time, in order to find a way out.

  He said, “Dr. Asimov, do you believe in God?”

  And I said, “Whose?”