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Carnovsky’s Retreat
A Novel
Larry Duberstein
New York
to my father, with love
—This is human life: this is the infinitely precious stuff issued in a narrow roll to us now, and then withdrawn for ever; and we spend it thus.
—Virginia Woolf, July 1926
—The mass of men lead lives of public transportation.
—Wally Wiley, July 1956
My uncle Oscar Carnovsky, my mother’s brother, died last July even though we had planned a trip to Saratoga Springs in August, he and I, to see some racing. Nothing could have been more unlikely, more out of character for Oscar than to miss a day at the races, except perhaps for the dying itself. I cancelled my half of the trip too; it was the thought of the racetrack without him, any racetrack, that made me realize how much I cared for Oscar, and how much I would miss him. Certainly I could not imagine going upstate to Saratoga without him, or with anyone else for that matter.
But the two most vivid memories I have of my uncle have nothing to do with horse racing. Each struck me at once with the news of his passing and each went far back, long before the time we became friends and would do the city together several times a year. The first occurred when I was only four years old, in fact, and Oscar must have been in his middle thirties, though to me then he was in the way of an elderly relation.
While he always deserved to be my favorite uncle—as indeed he was—the truth is that Oscar purchased the status initially; he gave me a dollar. It was my first acquisition of the kind and believe me when I say that this was truly The Almighty Dollar, for it had never crossed my mind I could have one of my own, a soft green paper dollar. And somehow having one made me not merely rich but also more of a person. It certified me. Money can do that.
My second recollection went back a mere thirty years to the time when Oscar was in his late forties, living with my Aunt Tanya in Brooklyn, a short ride from Oscar’s warehouse. He ran his own business importing and distributing beer, and would go off to the warehouse every morning in much the same way. They had a routine, as most couples will, in which they drank a cup of coffee together, then rationed the morning paper right there on the stoop into his and hers (his was Sports and hers was Features and the devil take the news of the day) after which he would kiss her cheek and start down the block. At the corner Oscar would look back and wave once. Then, and only then, even on the coldest morning in January, would my aunt go back inside the house.
Not terribly riveting, I know, and yet much was to be made of the fact that this quite ordinary scene, this little play, was enacted with all the usual stops and turns on the morning my uncle vanished into thin air. Because one fine day, as they say in stories, Oscar waved from the corner and was seen no more. Not that evening, nor the next morning; neither the next month nor the next year. Poof!
He had said nothing to give either Tanya or my mother the least hint of his intentions—if he had any, for of course there were initial fears of foul play—nor did any communication reach them during the more than two years he was away. And then he did return, again without fanfare or explanation, on a rainy day in October of 1957, on the eve of Tanya’s birthday as it happened, though not because he had remembered it. The occasion had been chosen at random; the dozen yellow roses he admitted were only a “gesture”. And that was it.
Time elapsed was in fact two years plus four months—roughly nine calendar seasons. A few ballplayers had retired (most notably Jackie Robinson) and one or two old movie queens might have died, but Ike was still President and Uncle Oscar was “home”. Thus the gestation period of a Returnee. I was seventeen, my own life just beginning. As far as I could tell then it might not begin for some time yet (and sometimes sitting quietly by myself at night I catch myself wondering if it ever has) but I can remember seeing Oscar soon after his return and finding him as sweet and funny as ever. He was always a very affectionate man. And naturally he gave me a dollar that time too, for it had become a tradition with us, and in 1957 a dollar was still money.
Like my parents, I was consumed with curiosity, eager for the story. What had happened to Uncle Oscar? Where had he gone, and why? My sister Barbara said Aunt Tanya “smelled” and that was why; I could not completely ignore her analysis for we had long agreed there was an aroma, albeit one I no longer felt certain I disliked. But could that really have been it? If so, what brought him back? Surely Tanya had not submitted herself to an extensive fumigation in the interim?
Frivolities aside, I did not rouse my limited courage to ask Oscar at the time, and I knew that nothing in the whole creation could be more patently futile than to ask my parents. I did ask eventually, at age nineteen and then throughout my twenties, and I was still asking a decade later though only in jest. By then we both knew, Oscar and I, what his answer would always be: a grin and a one-dollar bill. As the dollar grew smaller (with inflation and because by now I made my own) the grin grew wider, the joke richer. The bill became a source of giddy hilarity to him, such that he might bring himself to tears of laughter in the attempt to make this presentation with a straight face, to his favorite nephew, now thirty-five years old, now forty-one.
And then he was gone again—this time for good—dead at the age of seventy-six and at his funeral my aunt handed me a package. It was flat and rectangular, a cardboard manuscript-box in fact, though what she handed over was wrapped in layers of the rough brown paper and wide tan tape I recognized from the old warehouse, so that nothing inside rattled audibly. A legacy left not in his Will, where I was also remembered, but in trust with Tanya. Did she know what it was?
She said not, and I did and do believe that was the case, though her curiosity must have been boundless. Or perhaps not. Perhaps in real grief and shock, the box could not mean a damned thing to her whatever the contents. She probably assumed it was a dusty collection of old racing sheets anyway, or some idiotic betting “system” for beating the races. To me it was treasure.
Literally so, for when I got it home and opened it later that night I found right on top a crisp freshly-minted two-dollar bill, within the very texture of which I could discern my uncle’s laughter. Inflation factored in at last! But beneath the bill, a last playful laugh to share, lay more serious secrets: the Daybooks of Oscar Carnovsky. The missing years, day by day, month by month. Oscar in absentia had kept a journal, and he had kept it ever since—not in the sense that he had added to it (the final entry was dated some two months prior to his return, in 1957) but merely saved it, for me apparently. He wanted someone to see it someday and I turned out to be that someone, to my great delight.
To me the text is absolutely fascinating and endlessly provocative. This is not to say as much would be true for anyone else. But all my life, since the time of Oscar’s curious program, my consideration of the larger questions (such as it has been) has always referred back to the “missing years”. As far as I know nobody, including Tanya, ever learned a thing about them. It is also true that no one other than myself seems to have much cared, but I have, and I do, and as I say with always the softminded assumption that if there were answers or even clues to the larger questions concerning the Purpose or Meaning of life, those answers were tied irrevocably to the mystery of Oscar Carnovsky.
Or the three mysteries I should say—for there were three—at times of a piece in my thinking and at other times quite separate considerations. 1. Why he went, in the peculiar fashion described. 2. What he did while away. 3. Why
he came back. Now as a successful, relatively urbane middle-aged businessman, the man to whom Tanya most dutifully did hand the magical package on the morning of the funeral, even as that man I was convinced that I suddenly held the key to these mysteries of Oscar Carnovsky and therefore to the mystery of life itself.
Credulous? Puerile? Certainly you could say so. And though I hesitate to digress, it may be worth a few lines here to tell something of who I am, or appear to be, other than the kid with the dotty disappearing uncle. To put the matter in its simplest form, I am Walter Ford, Jr., born 1940, dirty blond hair, clean gray mind. I am very much what in my youth was derisively called a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, though my mother was at one time Florence Carnovsky, Oscar’s little sister. I do not imagine she thinks of herself that way very often, now (and long since) at two removes from it. This might have been different (and different for myself as well) because in 1935 my mother married a man named Louis Schecter in the Temple Emanuel in Brooklyn, and this was just as God intended I am sure.
The trouble was that in 1937, two scant years later, that young gentleman died “of a heart” and so became in time a curio of sorts to my mother, mere ancient dust to my father who never knew him, and a rather intriguing ghost to me. In 1939 Florence Schecter (née Carnovsky) married again, this time my flesh-and-bloodline father Walter Ford, and just one year later she had become “Flo Ford” and he had become Walter Ford, Senior. Unlike myself, they had each had some choice in these matters.
Never have I felt anything toward my progenitor save warmth, respect, and gratitude. He was always a good father to me and yet at some juncture in my youth I did also begin to feel that something had gone wrong. I suspect mine was like the experience of a youth who gradually becomes aware of his own homosexuality, and sees that all the small differences he has perceived in confusion are explained by the single unchanging over-arching circumstance. Put it this way: I am a creature of chance, as we all must be, but of chance gone itself awry—chance to the second power—because I should have been born two years earlier, to two different parents, Florence and Louis, in which case I would be older than I am now not merely by two years but older in some ways by centuries. I should be a Jew. I should be Harvey Schecter.
To be Walter Ford, Jr. has never quite fit me, like a suit of the wrong size, and makes me a changeling before the fact—before the cradle or the stoop, before even the womb. A preconceived changeling then, exchanged in the playful mind of God, the Big Guy, grimacing at Hitler’s advances in Europe, chagrined by Chamberlain’s Munich Appeasement, spinning his magnetized dice in quest of comic relief. Walter Ford, Jr.
To this day I believe that Schecter is trapped somewhere inside me, a man as I say slightly older and more emotive (a worrier really, as I see him) but dark-haired and kindly, like Oscar I suppose, or like Cissy’s older brother Leon. (Cissy, or Cecilia, is my wife.) I am Schecter suppressed, enclosed, and it is this lifelong suppression that makes me what I am: boring. Oh yes, I know it.
Funny thing, growing up Walter I knew Harvey Schecters, lots of them, by various names, and I know for certain that many wished they had been Walter Fords. I didn’t not wish it, I simply wasn’t it, like those hypothetical homosexuals who at the first shock of recognition must have cried inwardly, Oh no not me, for they knew it was cast in granite, it was what was. At a large conference in Detroit last month, in a crowded banquet room, I heard someone call out “Harv!” and spun around to see who it was wanted my attention.
All right, I have exaggerated all this, been carried away in the telling. It is more a whimsical wisp of a thing, an amusement if you like, and not the governing neurosis of my personality. Of that flat unflappable self myself. I am a great success, you see, flat unflappable success of the most familiar sort—did well in school and never misbehaved. None of this imagined identity confusion deterred my straightline march to status and security. I have never been the kind of success Harvey Schecter might have been, that’s all; nary a drop of creative aggression fermenting inside me.
I break stocks, or broker them for a living, and even that is Oscar’s joke, not mine. I am a stockbroker, quite the competent one, and I make money at it, so much so that we have houses both in Greenwich and in the Berkshires. Stockbreaking from Stockbridge by telephone, I still make money. Thousands in a few minutes. A fine fellow I am I am. It even comes naturally to me, without effort. Successful slob father of _______ and _______; devoted son to _______ and _______; loving husband of _______. The obituary line is solid, unimpeachable. They’ll never suspect it was Harvey they buried, dark-haired Harv in Walter’s drab blond body.
All I am telling you, really, is that I am terribly different from the uncle I so loved and admired. That Oscar and I are opposites, or so I see it. Did he see it that way too? And did he leave me with these secrets as a corrective, a lesson before too late, or merely as a kindness, knowing the depth of my interest? For here I sit in my comfortable office suite and nothing can move me; even if I despised my life I’d stay the course. Yet Oscar loved that shabby little office of his and walked away. We fall on the leaning side, that is all one can say, as there are men who will kill without apparent cause and others incapable of the slightest violence though fiendishly provoked.
Just this morning we were in here discussing this whole befuddling nuclear business, and Bill Aarons was saying he felt agonized dealing shares for Niagara-Mohawk’s new nuclear plant—that he felt tainted, an accomplice before the fact of some future nuclear disaster. And when I was alone I found myself at the window, looking down thirty-one stories and trying to imagine The Bomb exploding (although we had discussed only the energy side). A vast expanse of Manhattan is visible from up here and yet I could imagine just a piddling blast, a gasoline bomb, that took apart a few storefronts, kicking up chunks of sidewalk and filling the air briefly with glass. Nothing substantial. And I felt safe because I could see the whole explosion, so small and decorously self-contained that I was never engulfed by it, never included in the damage.
Unimaginable to me that an object dropped here could even rend Central Park, much less devastate the landscape of Massapequa or kill all the shop-keepers where they stand in Nyack and Peekskill, or as far north as Albany. I simply don’t feel large things, or better (though ungrammatic) I don’t feel things large. The threat of nuclear disaster is to me trifling alongside the threat of the milk going sour.
And that is why I have been so fascinated by Oscar and by what he did, for until he did what he did my uncle might have been taken for a timid soul himself. His shoes were nailed as firmly to the kitchen floor as anyone’s. Just picture that ritual of departure, every morning for years and years—the kiss and the wave from the corner. How very radical it was, not just that he left (if that’s what he did, and it wasn’t, as he didn’t, finally) but rather how he left. In a puff of smoke.
How strange to conceive or be capable of executing such an exit. Think of Tanya that first evening, and the next, and the next. Think of my mother and the other frantic siblings. Think of the long chain of liquor stores on the Island crying out for their Carlsberg and Heineken. See ya fuckin later.
I was there and can well recall how the inconceivability of Oscar’s action was far more discussed than was the act itself, almost as though they resented his methods more than they mourned the loss of his companionship. Granted it was a sea-change, just as wondrous as when some quiet young church-deacon goes ape, swinging naked from lamp-posts and raping shop-girls there in the moonlight.
Yet it did happen. Moreover, as I learned in reading my uncle’s journal, it is something of a syndrome. In the early stages of his new existence Oscar was apparently fascinated himself by what he had done, and sought out random examples in life and literature of others who had sunk their boats without trace. Who had waved cheerfully from the corner, as it were, and kept on going. He clearly believed the “Walkaway” was a definite exotic species and set himself to gathering and recording all available lore, like Melville c
ataloguing the trivia of whales—or more like Noddy Boffin’s gallery of misers, since Oscar belonged to the genus even as he researched and compiled it. And belonging, he seems neither horrified nor charmed, merely interested. A student and critic of the possibilities of the form.
Of course one could argue that this “rare” phenomenon is nothing but a variation on the commoner forms of separation and divorce, that those categorized as Walkaways stand linked by some incalculable coefficient of correlation to those others who simply walk out in conventional fashion (after much disputation and grief) and possibly also to the myriad who never go at all yet wish to. “The mass of men lead lives of public transportation,” as Oscar’s friend and associate Wally Wiley puts the matter in these pages. But I am inclined to agree with my uncle that there is a difference in kind, something unique here, just as all men walk but very few walk the high wire.
Now I offer these notes to the world with no true sense of their value to anyone other than myself. Although the chronological nature of their accumulation makes it possible to posit a beginning, middle and end of sorts, they do not purport to tell a story. And while they do more or less provide answers to the three mysteries of Oscar Carnovsky, the answers themselves do not involve thrills or chills; he never fell in with pirates or princes, or proved ready to die for perfect love. So perhaps it is all quite drab.
In fairness to Oscar, the journal was never shaped or edited, nor was it originally intended for anyone’s eyes but his own. It came to me strewn with blots and doodles and cross-outs—a pile of paper. If it fails the tests of literature, the fault is not Oscar’s but mine, for presenting it as such. I will say, though, that words nowadays are “processed,” like fake cheese, and these words, Oscar’s, are not. They are him, no “cheese product” but rather the real cheese. There is a voice in these pages that becomes more and more Oscar to me as I listen to it.
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