A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing

by T Cooper

“I won!”

  She’d probably flirted up the roulette dealer. Or not. She was just charmed, that girl was.

  “There’s some sandwich left if you want,” I said.

  “I am hungry.”

  Of course she was.

  “Baby, don’t forget you need to take your heart medicine at 4:00,” I said.

  “Lou, you are such a bore.” She walked over and sat on the bed next to me with a sweet little kiss on the cheek. “Nothing changes, does it?”

  No, nothing does. And yet, everything does.

  Marjorie. My Marjorie. She was even more stunningly lovely in her eighties than she’d been at twenty. All her delicate beautiful bones had worked themselves to the surface of thinned old-woman silk-soft skin. And her still-heliotrope-perfumed hair was silver. Truly silver. I detested how so many of our friends died their blow-dried helmets in impossible shades of black and red and brown. My own short no-fuss hair tended toward sulfured tinges of yellow, but Marjorie’s was the silver stuff angels would weave stars from—if they only could.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, darling,” she said and smiled.

  I wiped a white bread crumb from her wrinkle-free polyester blouse.

  “Yes, Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  1946

  ONE MORE OLD HAT

  BY DARIN STRAUSS

  ONE MORE OLD HAT

  Just as I was getting up to leave.

  “Hey, hold it a minute,” Mr. Olishansky called to me.

  Olishansky (a seventyish real-estate lawyer) had a soft custard voice, and a dark, horizontal wrinkle across his hairless scalp. “Listen, mister,” he said, “if you’re the young man I’m thinking of, I got a story for you.”

  Olishansky and I had come, separately, to sit shivah for my Uncle Harold, who had died of a brain tumor that week. All around us in what had been Harold’s house, the mirrors were covered with black cloths of mourning.

  “So, Bella tells everyone you’re a writer,” Olishansky said. “If I can trust you, I got a book idea that’s a million-seller for sure. Can I trust you?”

  I’d seen him talking to my Aunt Bella earlier, his hands over hers, his honeydew head dropped in sympathy.

  Now he was looking sideways at me: a gaze of disquieting intensity. I know a lot of people say they have stories, this look seemed to say, but the story you’re about to hear is nothing like the so-called stories you hear from those other schmucks.

  It was a look people had thrown at me before.

  “Well, um,” I said, “the thing is …” I had my coat and gloves on already.

  “If you’re not interested, fine,” Olishansky said. “A busy young fellow like you.” He was judging me as he spoke, cocking his blemished face—as if trying to suss out a faint noise in another room, a neighboring house, a far-off country.

  “How old are you?” he asked at length. “Thirty, thirty-two?”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear his story, I told him, but I was kind of in a rush.

  “It’s the life of my father,” he said, winking at me.

  Here’s the story.

  My father came from the old country. Russia, I’m talking about. Matter of fact, he was a poet. You ever heard of Osip Mandelstam? No? He was very famous in Russia, Mandelstam. My father was not as famous as Mandelstam. But close. Until 1929, he had a big following, my father. Then one day his works were no longer published. My father’s name was Isaac Olishanski.

  You know the name Anna Akhmatova? Another famous poet. She was my father’s girlfriend for a time, sort of. Was your image flickering sweet in the theater of my brain/Before you were even born? That lovely poetry line was my father’s. Well, it sounds better in the original Russian. He and another poet, Mikhail Bronstein, were leading elements of the Zenithist school of writers; that I’m sure you’ve heard of. No?

  My father was thrilled by the Revolution when it came. Don’t judge: A Jew back then, even if he was not religious, he was still a Jew in the eyes of the Cossacks, and that spelled trouble. Communism offered a change. My father, he was just twenty in 1917, started writing journalism that praised Lenin. Not that he stopped doing his poetry, but this journalism was taking up his time. He and Mikhail Bronstein had a lot of fights about this. “Olishanski, you’re giving your art short shrift”—that kind of thing. Bronstein, who welcomed the February 1917 Revolution but not the October 1917 Revolution, called my father a propagandist. That’s a word that really hurt my father, propagandist, because he was a poet above all else. All else. So my father stopped speaking to Bronstein.

  When Stalin came to power—God shit on that monster’s head—my father’s friend and rival Bronstein disappeared. Most likely to Siberia, or worse. (Bronstein had written this epigram, Murder must be fun/For Russia’s Attila the Hun.) Anyway, some loudmouths in the poetry world thought that my father betrayed Bronstein to the authorities. Ridiculous! But he wasn’t deaf, my father, to that kind of gossip. He understood there was this talk. All untrue, of course. Totally untrue! Because, you have to understand, Stalin then stopped my father’s work from getting out, too. I mean, would Stalin have done to my father what he did if my father was on his payroll? No, Stalin would not have done to my father what he did if my father was on his payroll. So, then came the hard times. No more poetry from Isaac Olishanski from now on, said the Soviets. This made no sense! Because he’d been in the circle of officially approved poets, my father.

  Anyhow, after eight months of this silence, my father became desperate. He wrote a history of Stalin, a long poem I mean, very favorable; still nothing. He was “doomed to silence” is the way he put it. Doomed. I guess if you writers can’t write, then it’s all doom doom doom.

  Anyway, from bad to worse—my father got a call from a government official by the name of Andrei Andreevich, a cockroach from the Soviet Security Bureau. My father was to come in and answer “concerns about the bourgeois, overly cerebral nature” of his work, or some such nonsense.

  Now, the Soviet Security Bureau had been the agency that had gotten rid of my father’s friend Bronstein. Probably Andreevich had killed that poet himself.

  Understand, my father was very isolated by then. Thirty-five, thirty-six years old, he had no friends, no wife at this time, and he was estranged even from his parents, because he’d called them reactionary and spat in my grandmother’s eye. In other words, he was all alone for what he thought would be his last night alive. Andreevich was going to have him killed for sure. The thought of certain wrongs he had done to placate the Soviet government, certain moments of cowardice, came at him now like a woodpecker pecking at the inside of his head. Peck, peck, peck.

  When he went the next morning to the offices of the Soviet Security Bureau at the Spasskaya Tower, wearing his only suit (a blue one) and a rope for a belt, my father had to wait for six hours outside Andreevich’s office. Nothing to read, just listening to the thump thump thump of his heart for almost a whole day. Thump, thump, thump; peck, peck, peck. Hours of this! Finally, at ten after 5:00, the cleaning workers started to turn off all the lights. My father didn’t know what to do. Is this a trick? he thought. Someone must have been testing him, he thought. So he stayed there in the dark. Just sat there alone, sweating (he was a big man and often sweated like a milk cow).

  After two more hours of nothing he just left, and you know what? He never went back.

  Get this. Turns out, the bureaucrat cockroach Andreevich had himself been arrested that same morning, for a supposed lack of allegiance to the Five-Year Plan. Imagine! The drama—my father missed death by a whisker.

  “So, Mr. Writer,” Olishansky said. “You write this, they’ll call you a new Chekhov!”

  The nature of his eagerness was familiar to me.

  I smiled at him, the sort of narrow smile I thought appropriate for the moment. We were standing close enough that I heard his sport jacket rustle as he began to nod. Meanwhile, someone unseen had started to weep in my Aunt Bella’s living room.

  “Misse
d death by a whisker,” Olishansky said, and he smiled as if he were telling me his father had bequeathed him millions, or a comparable treasure.

  I told him it was a wonderful story. His nods got more vigorous. And the weeping in the other room was growing louder. I turned to see if it was Bella who was crying. It was. Her old face had been squeezed by grief; the dark vigor of her wrinkles bespoke the terrible lonely fear of a widow who’d never before lived by herself. I turned away so that she wouldn’t see I’d been staring.

  Olishansky was still nodding at me.

  Was he thinking of writing the story as a book? I asked.

  “Me?” he said. He fired a toot of irritability from the cannon of his nose. “Just listen, Mr. Writer,” he said. “There’s more.”

  That whole thing with Andreevich spooked my father, of course, and he decided to get out of Russia. Not an easy thing to do after the war. Some people in the West, however, powerful people, still remembered the name Olishanski.

  We ended up in Budapest for a month, waiting in what my father called a camp—but it wasn’t a camp; it wasn’t that bad, he was a writer, with a writer’s imagination, remember—and then we made it onto a steamer bound for New York in 1946.

  Oh—that’s right: we. My father had met my mother in St. Petersburg in 1942. She was a milliner, very pretty. I was born in Russia in 1943, not that I speak that particular language.

  Anyway, it was hard for him in this country, my father. We lived for a while in Little Italy. Of course, not many people knew Russian there in 1946. It was an unpopular language in the later ’40s and ’50s, put it that way. My parents stopped speaking it altogether, like a purge, and changed the i at the end of our name to a y.

  My father got a job making deliveries for the Ansonia Pharmacy on Sixth, in the Village. Yeah—pharmacies used to make house calls back then. Where were the powerful people who’d told him to come to America? “Blown off like loose papers in a wind,” my father said.

  In any case, he started trying to write poetry in English. Just a little at first, he hoped to do some more as his fluency improved. And my mother worked in Chinatown, she was the only non-Chinese girl in this factory on Canal Street that made knockoff leather gloves.

  So, here’s where the story picks up again. One day my father has to make a delivery to this fancy Fifth Avenue address, headache salts or something. Right near that park that’s by NYU. Anyway, who’s ordering this stuff—who lives behind the fancy door to the penthouse apartment—but Mikhail Bronstein, the Russian poet who was supposedly dead back in Russia.

  Locks unlocking, click click click, and then Bronstein opens the door with, “Yes, hello?” At that point they recognize each other for who they are, and he and my father stand there, silent as two old dogs going face-to-face.

  It was not an easy moment, I can tell you. My father lost his breath as he looked at the face of this man who had been his friend and rival. Was it him? Had to be. The old-fashioned glasses over the old-fashioned nose. Those watery-blue eyes. (My father described this scene to me so many times I, an eleven-year-old boy, could recite it along with him.) Anyway, my father took an unthinking step backward, and so did Bronstein. For a full minute neither could believe what he saw, though life should have taught both of them to believe everything. Bronstein in a silk robe? My father thought his eyes had lost their mind. Bronstein in this big-shot apartment?

  Twenty feet behind Bronstein there was a bay window that looked down on the whole city—from this height, it was a view that my father rarely got to see in his life. By the window, a shiny piano had its lid lifted. And here was Bronstein, looking at my father without blinking, or speaking. Would he say something about their past? My father hoped not. A hatred grew tangled in my father’s chest. He thought he’d punch Bronstein if the guy was tactless enough to bring up their shared past and their different presents. But my father wanted to punch Bronstein if he’d be rude enough not to mention it. So you can see my father’s dilemma. Here’s where a good writer could do it justice. But only a good one. I put it to you.

  So, finally my father just said, “You ordered this, mister?” with that syrupy accent of his.

  “Yes,” Bronstein said with the very same accent. “Well, my wife ordered it.”

  Funny how the eyes are drawn to things sometimes. Is it the Talmud that says people have a sense that tells them where to look, what to see? Maybe it was a poem I read. But over Bronstein’s shoulder, my father caught sight of a new book jacket that was written in English, a book of poetry with the name Bronstein big across the spine. That hurt, you can probably imagine.

  “Seventy-five cents, please,” my father said.

  Bronstein gave the money, but—and my father always pointed this out whenever he told the story—he didn’t look my father in the face; Bronstein’s eyes were facing the floor when he thrust the money into my father’s hand. Both men knew the real poet was now delivering headache salts. My father, a goddamn delivery boy! No, he was not that!

  They didn’t cross paths again, my father and Bronstein. But the old woodpecker started up again. The woodpecker that he’d known in Russia once more started pecking and pecking at his brain. And it did this for the rest of his life. He talked about it to me. “That goddamn woodpecker,” he’d say. “That goddamn woodpecker never takes a day off.” Which is very poetic. But he never wrote a word of poetry in English and lived very poor until I bought my parents a house in Florida six months before they died, one right after the other. The end.

  “Wow, Mr. Olishansky,” I said. “That is a story, all right.”

  “Of course it’s a story. What else would it be, a show tune?”

  Olishansky stared into my face with humid, deliberating eyes. He was waiting for me to say more. He put the tip of his tongue to his upper lip. The old man actually bounced on his toes a little, but slowly. The skin around his lips tightened. I wanted, of course, to say something about the story; something encouraging. I didn’t. And at that moment I couldn’t have said why I didn’t.

  By now Olishansky was pulling unhappily at the cuffs of his jacket. Sizing me up.

  “Don’t patronize,” he said in a peculiarly calm way, blinking. “I’m aware of how evocative it is. I said it needed a good writer. Maybe I have to look somewhere else.”

  His air of outright displeasure lent him a certain dignity.

  “Well, maybe that’s right,” I said. “I just don’t think that I’d know how to tell it.” I wasn’t lying. I thought it an interesting story, but one that I wouldn’t know how to shape into a narrative. As often happens with life, the structure was nonexistent. The middle part had its own dramatic peak, and then, all that time later, a single moment of pathos. But how to handle the years in between?

  “What the hell do you mean, how to tell it?” His eyes bulged out, as if from a force inside his head. “What kind of a question is that? You would just tell it. God in heaven. Straight! You’d tell it straight! It’s a beautiful story, what’s so hard?”

  “There would have to be some kind of framing device. Some imposed architecture, or—” I couldn’t find the word I wanted. “Anyway, it’s not mine; it’s yours, this story.”

  He wasn’t listening. “Writers,” he said. “They go through life not recognizing gold when it falls in their hands.”

  And then he waved me off with a gesture that meant phooey, and walked past me toward the door and out of this story.

  I didn’t go anywhere. My Aunt Bella was still crying in the next room, not hysterically, but like a tired child. I was pretty sure I was the only person in my family who knew that my Uncle Harold had cheated on Bella for the last twenty years of his life. Who would tell that story, the life of Harold and Bella? Or the story of my own father, who’d made a fortune as a young man, lost it all, earned a second fortune, and then lost that fortune, too? There are innumerable stories in the world, even in my own family, stories that belong to me, they are mine, and yet the feeling to tell any of them is crumpled up i
nside me like an old hat.

  I waited a minute until I was sure I wouldn’t run into Mr. Olishansky outside. And then I went home.

  1955

  THE COURAGE TO LOVE

  BY SARAH SCHULMAN

  THE COURAGE TO LOVE

  New York City

  Anna Fuchs had a hot plate. She boiled coffee and soup. There was black bread, real butter. She stewed fruit. Anna ate toasted corn muffins with that butter, and she bought jars of fruit salad and some cheese. She sliced a tomato. She bought cold cuts from the German delis and strong mustard. Two bottles of beer sat in the refrigerator for months. The moment was never right. There was a bottle of sherry somewhere. Two nice glasses. Occasionally, a piece of cake. That summed up her domesticity.

  To cook would never be.

  There was classical music on the radio. This had become a habit. It was civilizing. She loved her chair. It moved her, emotionally, the comfort of that chair. Its love, in a way.

  Someone had phoned that morning to see if she was the same Anna Fuchs who had been murdered at Baba Yar. But no, that one was Russian, ironically also a doctor. This one was German. Same name. The caller still had hope. For his sister. He was a laundryman from the Ukraine. Charlie Yevish. Was this productive, Anna wondered, imagining that the dead had lived? Occasionally there were stories. She knew that her husband was dead, and she hoped he was dead. She didn’t need him and she didn’t need to see him. If he had lived, he would have hurt her even more. Their son. Leo’s troubles were coming to the surface now. He was irrational. Angry. Was this caused by Leo’s years of exile in Turkey, the torture and death of his father? Or was it his father’s cruelty before he himself had become the victim? These distinctions would become more and more difficult to draw. Would Leo have been equally conflicted if he had grown up quietly in an educated home with a sadistic father? Or did it take the Nazis to make him this sick? There, she said it. Her son was sick. She knew it. Does the cruelty of others transform one’s mental health, or simply reveal existing problems? Now he was training to be a psychiatrist. He could have a brilliant career in America. Even if his symptoms deepened. The controlled atmosphere of the therapeutic relationship might help. The authority. The power might help her son. The power to help others. Sometimes the mentally ill can improve by caring for a pet, or an aged grandparent. Or, perhaps, a patient. A child.