“Pretty good,” Yossarian told him.
“That’s good. Just don’t let anybody in here push you around. You’re just as good as anybody else in here even though you are Italian. You’ve got rights, too.”
Yossarian winced and closed his eyes so that he would not have to look at his brother John. He began to feel sick.
“Now see how terrible he looks,” the father observed.
“Giuseppe,” the mother said.
“Ma, his name is Yossarian,” the brother interrupted her impatiently. “Can’t you remember?”
“It’s all right,” Yossarian interrupted him. “She can call me Giuseppe if she wants to.”
“Giuseppe,” she said to him.
“Don’t worry, Yossarian,” the brother said. “Everything is going to be all right.”
“Don’t worry, Ma,” Yossarian said. “Everything is going to be all right.”
“Did you have a priest?” the brother wanted to know.
“Yes,” Yossarian lied, wincing again.
“That’s good,” the brother decided. “Just as long as you’re getting everything you’ve got coming to you. We came all the way from New York. We were afraid we wouldn’t get here in time.”
“In time for what?”
“In time to see you before you died.”
“What difference would it make?”
“We didn’t want you to die by yourself.”
“What difference would it make?”
“He must be getting delirious,” the brother said. “He keeps saying the same thing over and over again.”
“That’s really very funny,” the old man replied. “All the time I thought his name was Giuseppe, and now I find out his name is Yossarian. That’s really very funny.”
“Ma, make him feel good,” the brother urged. “Say something to cheer him up.”
“Giuseppe.”
“It’s not Giuseppe, Ma. It’s Yossarian.”
“What difference does it make?” the mother answered in the same mourning tone, without looking up. “He’s dying.”
Her tumid eyes filled with tears and she began to cry, rocking back and forth slowly in her chair with her hands lying in her lap like fallen moths. Yossarian was afraid she would start wailing. The father and brother began crying also. Yossarian remembered suddenly why they were all crying, and he began crying too. A doctor Yossarian had never seen before stepped inside the room and told the visitors courteously that they had to go. The father drew himself up formally to say goodbye.
“Giuseppe,” he began.
“Yossarian,” corrected the son.
“Yossarian,” said the father.
“Giuseppe,” corrected Yossarian.
“Soon you’re going to die.”
Yossarian began to cry again. The doctor threw him a dirty look from the rear of the room, and Yossarian made himself stop.
The father continued solemnly with his head lowered. “When you talk to the man upstairs,” he said, “I want you to tell Him something for me. Tell Him it ain’t right for people to die when they’re young. I mean it. Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they’re old. I want you to tell Him that. I don’t think He knows it ain’t right, because He’s supposed to be good and it’s been going on for a long, long time. Okay?”
“And don’t let anybody up there push you around,” the brother advised. “You’ll be just as good as anybody else in heaven, even though you are Italian.”
“Dress warm,” said the mother, who seemed to know.
• • 19 • •
Colonel Cathcart
Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who lumbered when he walked and wanted to be a general. He was dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined. He was complacent and insecure, daring in the administrative stratagems he employed to bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in his concern that his schemes might all backfire. He was handsome and unattractive, a swashbuckling, beefy, conceited man who was putting on fat and was tormented chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension. Colonel Cathcart was conceited because he was a full colonel with a combat command at the age of only thirty-six; and Colonel Cathcart was dejected because although he was already thirty-six he was still only a full colonel.
Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better. The fact that there were thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained the rank of major enlivened him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the other hand, the fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were already generals contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than Hungry Joe’s.