by Peter Orner
“Why not?” my mother said. “People don’t live in Kansas forever? Listen, these people, they weren’t family; Horace may have been a thief, but he was our thief, but Mort and Ellie—she’s dead. Is that what you’re asking? Of course, Ellie’s dead by now.”
“And the boy? Monroe’s—Mort’s—son?”
My mother. I have this picture of her and her father on a bike. I’m staring at it right now. It’s on the wall above my desk. My grandfather has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and my mother is holding on to his waist, and her long blond hair is streaming in the wind behind her. My grandfather doesn’t look like a rich guy or anybody who even wants to be a rich guy. He looks like a furniture salesman from Fall River, Mass, riding his kid on the back of his bike. My mother is right. These people with serious (stolen) money and private psychiatric hospitals. They weren’t family.
“The boy?” my mother said. “The boy grew up. That’s what boys do. But Mort didn’t have a son. Coming into town every six months? That’s not having a son. What is it about Mort? You’ve been snooping around him—”
“I guess I feel a kinship,” I said. “Remember in college when I changed my name to Max to sound more Jewish?”
“You changed your name?”
“I lasted two weeks. Two weeks, I corrected people. ‘The name is Max.’ I admire a guy who can sustain that kind of bullshit for years, though I guess he wanted to sound less Jewish while for some reason I wanted to be—”
“You’re Jewish enough.”
“Not even that. I think I just wanted to be someone else.”
“You’re doing wonderfully, honey. Isn’t he doing wonderfully, Herb? You’re still sending your résumé around, right? Someone will call. And you had that interview with DePaul. Life takes turns, it—”
“The interview where I threw up?”
“Wonderfully,” Herb said. “He’s doing wonderfully. He dinged my car, Allstate wants to raise my rates he’s doing so—”
“Also,” I said, “I turned my back on a wife after she went nuts.”
“That’s not how anybody sees it. Your wife has mental health issues.”
“I didn’t help,” I said. “I tried to force a kind of normalcy—”
“Oh, please! You tried, period. You tried harder than most people would have ever tried. Do you hear this, Herb? Now he turned his back—”
“I heard, I heard.”
“Didn’t he try, Herb? Didn’t he try? For years—”
“Woo-hoo,” Herb shouted. “Hawks just tied it up.”
In the few pictures I found on microfilm at the Fall River Public Library, Monroe Sarkansky has dark, sleek, Sephardic features. Nothing at all like the saggy jowls of Horace. They don’t look like brothers. And Monroe wears a mustache that somehow doesn’t make him look ridiculous. And always that hat at an angle. Like an old-time private eye. I think the man was hiding out. He hid in Manhattan, on Long Island, in Nassau, but he also hid in the books that are sitting right here in a stack. And so, yeah, I feel a kinship. I’m only a poor relation who’s not a relation, but I’m sure as hell hiding. I wonder if you reach a point when you don’t even know who, or what, you’re hiding from.
And though he may well have squirreled away some money for her, there’s no evidence in any of the hundreds—Jesus, thousands—of lines of poetry he left behind that he ever thought much about the wife back home in Fall River. It was all clouds, and balloons, and his mother.
Ellie has never taken shape for me, either. Of her, I’ve never even found any photographs. I do know that at some point she returned to Fall River from Kansas because she died in the city. The death certificate on file at Government Center lists Eleanor Sarkansky’s cause of death as drinking paregoric. My mother knew, of course. Why dredge it up out of the darkness, out of the years? For what? Still, imagination fails. A faker, a scam artist, sure, him I get, though I’ll never reach Monroe’s highs or lows. At best, I’m a midlevel operator.
Once, a few years ago, I peeped into a back window of the house on Locust Street. I must have thought I might be able to conjure a vision of Ellie’s oval face by looking into what she had looked out of. All I saw was someone else’s life. A pair of glasses on a kitchen table, some car keys.
V
Renters:
A Sequence
There were people who went to bed
with an open umbrella.
—Natalia Ginzburg, “Winter in the Abruzzi”
Rhinebeck
At that point, they were still trying to solve it by talking, and so they went, together, to see a therapist who worked out of an office in her house. It was a charming place off a dirt road. There were always men working in the yard. It had a red roof. It was the sort of house that would always be unfinished. There were two of them, two therapists. The husband was retired, but he’d sit in on their sessions and listen. He never said anything, only sometimes he cracked his knuckles. Things were so bad that neither of them thought having this extra person in the room was strange. They were so desperate for the help they thought these people could give. And the therapist, the wife, the one they were supposed to be working with—ostensibly it was couple’s counseling—was kind and understanding, and she nodded and asked kind, slightly probing questions. Whenever her husband cracked his knuckles, she’d give him a look. The house was so beautiful: wood floors, carpets, the workmen outside. Plock, plock, plock. How could these people not help them? And after the sessions, exhausted, they’d go to the little movie theater in town and sit there and hardly watch whatever movie played—but it was good to be there in the dark, slumped in those plush seats. They began to become the kind of people who sit all the way through the credits when there are no more names to thank and the whole deal stops.
“Remember when they used to end with that pop?” he said once. “Not that I remember—”
“Shhhhhh, I’m still watching.”
Anything not to go home. Things were always worse at home. They were renting an old farmhouse that had been moved to town a 160 years earlier. He used to wonder how they moved it. Brick by brick? Door by door? The landlord used it as a summer retreat from the city. They were short-term renters. When she walked them through the place, the landlord called everything beloved. Here’s the beloved kitchen, the beloved yard, the beloved scuffed wooden stairs.
One day the husband therapist, who still had never said anything, called him at work. “It’s about your wife,” he said.
“Yes?”
“You don’t need couple’s counseling. I mean, everyone could use couple’s counseling, of course. Even Diane and I—” Chuckle, chuckle. “But you need to be aware that your wife is seriously ill and couple’s therapy can only be truly efficacious if both partners are at least reasonably—”
He remembers looking out the window then, at the students charging by. It was the time between classes when everyone is on the move and purposeful. He was a visiting professor. This was in 2006. He didn’t know anyone at the college. He was fleeting; people looked right through him. The psychologist talked on, offering the name of a psychiatrist in the city. He wrote the name and number down on the desk that wasn’t his. Dug the pen right into the wood and carved the doctor’s name and phone number for posterity. Your insurance should cover it, the husband therapist said, depending. Before he hung up, the man cleared his throat and, in a different, quieter voice, said, “Good luck to you.”
He hung up and sat there in that office that was someone else’s, someone else’s books, someone else’s pictures of a smiling daughter, and he thought of her now in the rented house, trying to work, trying to read, trying to concentrate. She often said all she wanted was to be able to concentrate. Why can’t I concentrate? Why? After they moved out, he got a letter from the landlord saying they’d trashed the house and that she was keeping the deposit. Then she sent more letters, threatening to sue him unless he sent more money. How could they possibly have trashed the place? They’d hardly lived in it. He sent her five hundred
dollars he didn’t have just to shut her up.
Historians
The well-known historian’s wife was a historian also. Each of them, husband and wife, were on opposite sides of the room, at the center of small clusters of people. The well-known historian, to his cluster, boomed that his wife was by far the superior scholar and that she spoke four, no, five languages. “Compared with her, I’m only a lucky hack.” He took an offhand swig of his drink. “Occitan’s a language, not a dialect,” he shouted across the room. “Am I right, darling?”
“That’s enough, Kenneth,” she said. “You can go back to talking about yourself now.”
Nervous guests laughed. This was during cocktails. It was a welcome dinner for new faculty. He was only visiting for the year and had been invited last-minute merely to fill out the gathering on account of there being a few no-shows. His first novel had won a couple of minor prizes. At dinner, they put him catty-corner to the president of the college. His temporary status made him an easy sacrifice. The president, a despot, a famous renegade philosopher (his trilogy rattled the establishment in the late ’60s), was renowned for not suffering fools. He forked a hunk of salmon into his mouth and, chewing, said, “Your novel. What’s it about? Of course, I’ll never read it.” And he humiliated himself by attempting to answer. He told the president about his attraction to the quotidian, which isn’t ordinary, no, not at all, not when you really—
The president leaned so far into his fish his nose almost touched his plate. Still earnestly discoursing on his affection for the commonplace, he examined that bald, shiny head so stuffed with virtuosity. He’d been warned. You had about forty seconds to make an impression on Himmelman. Blow it and you were dead to him forever. He drowned his own blather with a gulp of wine. Quotidian, did I really say—
Himmelman turned to the baby-faced sociologist to his left. “Justify your inane discipline, sir!”
The historian’s wife, seated next to him, took pity. She spoke into his ear in a whispered shout. “You think I want to be here, either?” She told him her husband was invited each year to add a little star power and belittle the newbies. The husband had written a series of wildly popular bestsellers about ancient Rome.
“And your wife?” she asked.
“She’s not feeling well,” he said.
“Smart,” she said. “I skipped it last year, and the almighty wasn’t amused. He called me to his office the next day and said what was I thinking? Did I want to unleash my husband on some misty little assistant professor of film studies?”
He didn’t know how to respond. He’d thought Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was interminable the first time he’d seen it. He was exhausted, ashamed. All he wanted to do was go home, but home was an entirely different disaster.
“What’s your field?” he asked the historian’s wife.
“Let’s not talk about work.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Nineteenth-century France.”
“So, Napoléon?”
“The revolution. I focus on radicalism. How it spreads, infects, secretes—”
“My wife’s losing her mind.”
She laughed. “She’s still got it to lose?”
“Truly. Off the rails. Either she is, or I am.”
He turned to face her. There was no compassion in her eyes in the candlelight. When she looked the other way down the table to respond to somebody’s question about the best restaurants (“Best? Around here? Are you kidding?”), he watched her left earring, a silver third eye. She was maybe ten years older. Maybe she was forty. Poised, confident, her long, long hair done up in a complicated twist. Her columned neck, he wanted to crash his face into it and die.
She’d turned back toward him and was tapping the edge of her glass lightly.
“What is your book about?”
“My what?”
They met in her office during office hours. He knocked. She immediately opened the door.
“Professor,” he said.
“Professor,” she said.
“I’ve only got my MFA,” he said.
She pulled him into the room and closed the door.
“Your what?” she said.
“What if a student comes?”
“Students don’t come.”
“But what if one were to?”
“Office hours are like wagon trains. You see any wagons? Mormons?”
Books, everywhere books, on the desk, on the shelves, books piled on top of one another on the floor like cairns. He kissed her and pulled away. “Your husband. His office must—”
“The historian?”
“Jesus, yes, the historian.”
“Three doors down on the right.”
“Jesus.”
“He’s teaching. He’s in Manhattan. He’s at a conference in Beijing. He’s in Reykjavík. He’s in his office. No, Lima. He’s in Lima. Anyway, he wouldn’t deign.”
“But what if he loses his keys, or one of the kids is sick or something?”
He was backed up against the desk, her body pressing against his. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Actually it wasn’t that long; exhilarating theater, really, he’d seen a revival in Chicago.
“What kids?” she said.
“What about a janitor?” he said.
“Himmelman fired all the janitors. We’re the janitors.”
They slid downward to the cold floor, toppling books.
“No kids? Really?”
“Two. A boy and a girl. Beautiful little towheads. Shut up, will you?”
Frantic mutual unbuttoning. One bare shoulder, another. A few times he stopped and said something absurd like how grateful he was. For what? He couldn’t explain exactly. That there weren’t any complications? That she just opened a door? She told him the boyish thing came off better when he didn’t talk. The blinds were down, but the window was open. Students chattered and laughed as they sauntered by on the walk outside. Even when he’d been a student—state school, he always said that proudly, I attended a state school—he’d always felt estranged from the chatter and the laughter. Why? Why had any sense of ease always felt so alien? And it would have been dramatic and maybe even cataclysmic had the sole student who went to office hours knocked and, without waiting, entered, or if the historian had, that one time, misplaced his keys, or one of the towheads really had taken sick at school, but nothing like that happened and the weeks passed, a month, and in early November he and Susan—that was her name—took a walk along the river. She slipped on a rock and fell on her elbow. There was a small cut, and he put his fingers over the wound to stop the bleeding, though there was hardly any blood, it was more of a scrape than a cut, but still he remembers the look of her blood on his fingers and how he convinced himself he was staunching a wound. Is it “staunch” or “stanch”? It was getting late, and colder. They sat down on their jackets in a small clearing near the water.
“What’d he do on Elba?” he asked. “Swim? Play cards?”
“Oh, fuck the pygmy. I told you, I study the way mass movements react, or don’t react, with reference to the—”
“Right, right.”
The Hudson churned by. Not a pretty river, a working river, a useful river. The reflection of the gray sky in the river, patches of white speckles. Above them a stand of leafless trees leaned out across the water as if trying to reach their brethren on the other side. She stood up and began calling the dog. She’d brought her dog. Her cover, not that she needed one, was that she was walking the dog. A half hour earlier the dog had run off to chase some birds and hadn’t come back.
“Pompy,” she called. “Pompy! Pompy! Pompeia! Come here, girl!”
Maybe tonight there would be calm.
And he thought of their bedroom in the little rented house. An upstairs room with space only for a bed, no night tables, no lamps, the sole light overhead.
How often in the night, in a new panic, his wife would leap up and tug the string of the overhead light and it was so bright and
he’d beg her to turn it off. We should sleep, honey, last night we hardly—
And she’d say, I know, I know, and she’d turn it off, but a few minutes later she’d jump up and pull the string again.
You’re not listening to me.
It’s because I need to sleep.
You never.
Please, honey—
I’m just asking you to listen.
We both gotta sleep, that’s what we—
For once—
Please, we have to—
The dog was nowhere. Susan sat back down. He began returning things to his pockets, his keys, his phone, his wallet.
“Maybe he swam on St. Helena,” Susan said. “The water would have been warmer down there, no? And on Elba he was plotting his latest havoc. He wouldn’t have had time to swim. But on St. Helena. Wait—so far out, there would have been sharks—”
“How come they didn’t just shoot him to begin with? Why keep sending him on vacations?”
“It wouldn’t have done to shoot Napoléon.”
“But didn’t they shoot everybody?”
“Yes, and they lopped off lots of heads, also. But he wasn’t everybody. And maybe in the back of the minds of certain royalists he was more one of them than a citizen. Anyway, that’s what Dunard argues, not unconvincingly, in the otherwise redundant book that got him tenure at Yale.”
“I’d have stayed on the island. Any island.” He stood and put his jacket on. He brushed grass off his pants.
“How long are you going to stick this out?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Maybe you’re a coward.”
“Probably.”
“No, you’re very decent,” she said. “But you do wallow in it. When I lose it, the historian will have me locked up in fifteen minutes. ‘What a waste,’ he’ll say. ‘She was so clever.’”
He brushed more grass off his pants.
“Stay,” she said. “My dog’s missing.”
