Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  The dinner finished, the guests sat at the table chatting. It was an intimate affair, Penny and Milt, Henry and Nelda Jo, and Orville and the woman Penny had arranged as his “date,” his childhood girlfriend Faith Schenckberg Schmerz, with whom, playing doctor in his basement as the furnace roared and the woodpile stank of rats, he’d had his first public erection. Faith, a religious Jew, wore a low-cut dress and push-em-up bra that brought to Orville’s mind the Hebraic phrase “a sunburnt offering.” During dinner Orville had the recurring feeling that his mother was hovering nearby. From time to time, furtively, he would glance up out a window, scanning the sky, but no.

  The aged port and top-shelf brandy circulated the mahogany table on rimmed silver trays, and Henry offered real Havana cigars along with a heavy silver cigar cutter. To Orville, the surprising thing was how sophisticated the evening was. He had grown up in a family one generation shy of immigrants who’d had no real tether to the rituals of the Old World and whose take on the New World was ad-driven toward “looks,” the “look” of a car or of an outfit or of a person was the currency. A man was summed up by the size of his neck, a woman by how ugly or lovely she was, as if getting away from the thin necks and ugliness of the shtetls of the Old World was more important than finding out the complex truth of the person. For Orville to dine elegantly so close to home was bizarre. And to have this come from Schooner? From the kid who, in the soaring vulgarity of the town, had been the most vulgar of all? Mousse saumon and coq au vin with a trou of palate-refreshing raspberry sorbet in between—from sadistic, pornographic, anti-Semitic Schooner, the only kid he knew who was ever expelled from Columbia High.

  Orville stared across the table at Schooner, seeing in his bulky body and square face and the neatly combed Andy Warhol–white hair and weird dark eyes—seeing in all this adulthood the same tough kid of twelve with the same block of a body and the same eyes that had filled him with terror. He could not help but see, in the smiling man, the vile boy.

  Reflexively Orville found himself fingering a raised nubbin of scar tissue on the back of his neck. When he was twelve, sitting in the front row of a sock hop in the Mount Carmel Church basement watching the girls jitterbug with each other, Orville had felt a sudden searing pain on the back of his neck. Jumping to his feet, turning around, he was face-to-face with a leering Schooner holding the cigarette butt he’d just put out on Orville’s neck. Schooner was daring him to do something about it. Bigger, tougher, stronger—first kid on the block with pubic hair, first on the block to sell dirty postcards from Mexico—Henry, seemingly at whim, would chase Orville and beat him up and tell him that if he told his mother or father he would beat him worse the next time. Orville, terrified, had never told. Schooner started extorting money from him for protection.

  He remembered Schooner sitting next to him in seventh grade and, during a Studebaker math drill, tapping him on the arm; when Orville looked over he saw Henry’s dick laid out on his desktop next to a ruler, and not to solve a math problem either. Another day, Schooner and another thug at Boy Scouts in the Lutheran Church basement dragged Orville into the men’s room “to see what a Jew dick looks like.” They pulled down his pants, did their mocking inspection, and, with a threat, let him go.

  The worst, in a way, were the basketball games at the Boys’ Club on South Third. Orville loved basketball. Schooner played, too, on an opposing team, played like a bull in a china shop, throwing elbows, cracking knees. Orville knew that if Schooner’s team lost, Henry would be waiting for him, and so toward the end of games, Orville tried to lose. If it looked like a win, he’d get ready as the clock ticked down, and the final whistle was like a starting pistol at a race and Orville would run like hell through the locker room down the stairs and up Prison Alley toward the Courthouse Square, Schooner chasing. If he was caught, he was extorted and/or beaten.

  Downstreet below Fourth was Henry’s home turf. He was poor and lived with his father, who worked nights as a security guard at Iron Mountain out near Tivoli. Their tiny house was close by the North Swamp among the poor Italian and Hungarian and Ukrainian immigrants, just a street away from the black section of town, near the Colored Citizens Club. Henry came from the bad part of town, without toys; Orville from the good, with a storeful.

  Before Orville had come back last August, the last time he had seen Henry Schooner was more than twenty years ago. Orville had been manager of the league champion Fish Hawk basketball team. The starting five—Whiz the black star, Konopski the tall farmer who played a solid center, Scomparza the kid who could rough ’em up under the boards, Basch the dentist’s son who could drill shots from long range, and Tommy Kline of Kline’s Whale Oil and Gas who was the sizzling, savvy playmaker—had made it clear to Schooner that if he messed with Orville he was dead meat. The Fish Hawks were hot. Tickets were in demand. Henry Schooner stole a roll of tickets for the big game against Troy and was scalping them. He got caught and was expelled.

  The last time he had seen Schooner was when the starting five and Orville, from the steps of the gym, watched Henry trudge away, his refrigerator body moving as if on wheels, his white-blond head unbowed. Just before he walked into the woods on the path that was a shortcut around Kleek’s Pond to the rough, impoverished zones of Downstreet, he turned and raised a middle finger at the team, mouthed a “Fuck you!” and disappeared into the woods.

  “A toast,” Henry was saying, rising from the table, raising his glass of port. “To Doctor Orville Rose, a welcome home, and to the memory of a fine lady of Columbia, a woman I often looked at as a kid wishing, since I had no mom to speak of, she could’ve been my mom. I’m talking about your mom, yours and our dear Penny’s, Selma Rose.”

  “To Orville and Selma Rose!” shouted all.

  “A wonderful couple!” shouted Milt.

  All eyes turned to Orville for a response. Given a whole childhood of Schooner’s threatening him with “If you tell anyone, especially your mother, I’ll kill you!” and given the smarminess of the toast that made Orville feel like throwing up the mousse, the coq, the sorbet in between and the two wines, it was only with the greatest discipline that he was able to rise, swallow his revulsion at Schooner’s current duplicity, and speak.

  “Thank you, Henry. Being back here again after so many years has been, well, sort of great, and I greatly appreciate your kind, great, really, words about my—our—mother. It’s been the greatest evening, a really great dinner. Penny and I greatly appreciate it.”

  It sufficed. The conversation rolled on. He sat there quietly drinking until Penny, in a lull, visibly perturbed that Orville was silent, said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

  “Oh,” Orville said, startled, for he had been in a reverie about Celestina Polo and the twenty tiny chapels set among the cypresses and gravestones on the pilgrimage site on top of the Sacre Monte. “I . . . uh, I was just wondering, why whales?”

  “Oh, Christ!” Milt said, in mock horror. “Him and his whales!”

  “What about the whales, dahlin’?” asked Nelda Jo. She was a dazzling, elegant blonde from Tulsa, with a nose just a touch too flat. She taught aerobics at Schooner’s Spa out on Route 9 near the mall and seemed to have a body made all of pectorals and gluteals, a body that reminded Orville of the female athletes in Zeist and of the women leading the exercise shows on TV. She was wearing a silky, casually draped beige dress with a V-neck that both showed a necklace of significant diamonds and two un-bra’d nipples, which seemed, to the slightly drunk Orville, as big as muscat grapes.

  Just my luck, he thought. She goes to Dr. Edward R. the Sociopath Shapiro.

  “I mean,” Nelda Jo went on, “are we talkin’ Moby-damn-Dick?”

  “I was wondering, with whales being the logo of Columbia, why whales?”

  “Oh, I get it,” Nelda Jo said. “You’re wondering why whales?”

  “Columbya wassa whalin’ port,” Faith said, slurring her words. “Caught ’em in
the river.” Faith had recently come out of a nasty divorce from Mouse Schmerz but had not come out too sober.

  “But whales live in seawater, right?” Orville asked. “The river is freshwater, right?” Everybody said right. “So?” No one knew. The conversation veered back toward the known. Soon Orville got beeped out. Schooner accompanied him to the door.

  “I am sensing that you are not comfortable here tonight,” Henry said. “Ever since you’ve come back, you’ve been avoiding me, and I just want you to know two things. Number one, I understand why. Number two, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Orville said, “I really—”

  “No, it is not okay, not okay at all. I have to earn your respect.”

  The beeper went off. “Gotta go.”

  “It’s early. Hope you finish up quick, maybe you can come back?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “I believe it.” Henry was shaking Orville’s hand in the way experienced politicians do: one hand in the voter’s, the other clasping the elbow in the most friendly way. This reminded Orville of Bill showing him how the old docs also did this to palpate the olecranon fossa of the elbow in unsuspecting patients, searching for nodules of syphilis.

  “One more thing,” Henry went on, “before you disappear for your noble rounds?”

  “Yeah?”

  “People change.”

  “Some don’t.”

  “As Shakespeare said, ‘The past is past.’”

  “What he said, Henry,” Orville said, seeing in those eyes the sadist, “is, ‘the past is prologue.’”

  “And ‘the play’s the thing!’ I don’t want any more confrontations between the both of us.”

  Orville noted the lapse of grammar, the old Schooner slipping out. And then he was surprised to see that Henry was noting his noting something.

  “It’ll take time, Orvy, to win your respect. I’m game if you are.” Orville said nothing. “We’re on the same team now.”

  “What team is that?”

  “Columbia. America. The world. We’re global now.” Schooner smiled. “You know, in the last couple of years I got close to your mom, real close. Great lady.”

  Orville had a sickening thought: he’s mailing the letters.

  “I’d go over to the house from time to time, look in on her, have a cup of tea, chat. It’s okay if you don’t come back tonight. It already means a lot that you came at all.”

  The funny thing, Orville thought in the emergency room, trying to deal with the carnage of a Saturday night in Columbia, is that Schooner seemed to have meant it.

  Doctoring tipsily is like tightrope walking without a net. As Orville popped a peppermint Lifesaver and revived a teenage girl overdosed on her mom’s Valium and Barbados rum, he tried to wrestle his mind into balance.

  He moved on to a hysterical Mrs. Len Date, wife of the Columbia town lawyer. Len had come home drunk. Mrs. Len had confronted him in the driveway, berating him until she noticed, in the bed of his pickup truck, the severed head of a woman. The rest of the woman was soon found by troopers in a sharp curve of a road way out past Omi. Orville sedated Mrs. Len and went next to tend to a three-year-old boy with a popcorn kernel stuck in his ear.

  The kid was screaming. Orvy tried to be nice. He let the anxious young mother hold the scared boy as he tried to pick the kernel out with a probe. No go. Then he tried to suck it out with a sucker, also with no luck. He tried this and that, the kid increasingly frantic and wailing, the mother trying to hold him steady. At that moment Orville felt the whole world of care turn, the way it does when things go wrong and the Emergency Gods are angry. He got frustrated, irritated, and called for a nurse to strap the screaming, flailing kid down to a papoose board so he could get a better take on the ear. The mother objected. Other patients were piling up. The emergency room was taking on a surreal feel, with word of another car crash on the way in. Disasters were waiting and more were brewing out there and the Great Doctor Rose couldn’t get the damn popcorn kernel out of the kid’s ear, and everybody was getting nasty, including him.

  “Hi there, little tyke, heh heh.”

  It was Bill, shuffling in toward the bedside, putting a hand on the mother’s shoulder and a hand on Orville’s, and breathing scallion into the air.

  “What’re you doing here?” Orville asked, but then realizing that the head nurse must have called him.

  “Me? Oh, I got this popcorn kernel stuck in my ear . . . Heh heh. Hi, Gloria,” Bill said to the mother and then, waving a red teddy bear at the boy, said, “Hi there, Benji boy. Got a red teddy for you here.” The boy stopped screaming and reached for it. “Y’know, Gloria, one of the hardest things in doctorin’ is getting a popcorn kernel out of a kid’s ear. It can get very frustratin’, right, Dr. Rose?”

  Orville bristled, feeling a hit of criticism. But then, feeling the warmth of Bill’s hand on his shoulder, as if now the hand itself were telling him—“Take it easy, it’s just a damn popcorn kernel”—he relaxed, and said, “Very.”

  “Want me to take a shot at it?” Bill offered.

  “Be my guest.”

  Bending over the ear, he took out of his pocket a homemade chrome and rubber thing and, still playing with the kid and the red teddy, worked the ear and with a whispering plucking sound like a string of a harp, out came the popcorn kernel. Orville was amazed, and was about to ask how the hell he’d done it when he got called away to attend to the car crash. Refreshed by Bill’s caring and skill, he took care with the victims, none of whom was badly hurt. He spoke to the families, glad to bring them good news. The Emergency Gods had come through.

  After one in the morning, he walked out of the hospital and guided the Chrysler with its liquid power steering back down to Courthouse Square. Across the way, the party was still going strong. The porch light cast an amber glow, the house was alight. Peals of laughter scurried through the tiny holes in the screen door out into the warm fall night.

  Should I go back? Orville wondered, as he pulled into his mother’s drive. No.

  Not feeling sleepy, he got a beer and came back out and sat on the porch. In the hot, still night, a kind of Indian summer’s Indian summer, a last batch of confused crickets sang out as if there were no tomorrow—which might well be, for them. Staring across the way at the party, Orville was unwilling to join in again, yet unable to get his mind off Henry Schooner.

  Henry was a mirror image of Gatsby—his past known, his present mysterious. Orville knew that Schooner had walked into the woods and joined the navy, had risen like a rocket, done tours in Vietnam, gotten his high school degree, had gone on to college and business school, and, in his own words, “had played a significant role in clandestine activities, national intelligence and security.” Just after Orville left America two years ago, Schooner returned home to Columbia with a dynamite wife of some wealth with a dancer’s body that wouldn’t quit, and two young boys, Henry Jr. and Max, both thick-bodied and blond, two compact refrigerators of the same brand.

  He bought one of the most expensive houses in town, on the most elegant square, and with a team of Filipinos renovated it to period elegance in record time with no breakages. Two Filipinos stayed on, husband and wife, and did all the childcare and household chores. At dinner parties they cooked fine meals in many cuisines of the world and, in stiff-starched white, served them. In addition to Schooner’s Spa, Henry had formed a company with Milt—Schooner and Plotkin, Developers—which was making a fortune. Word was out among New Yorkers that these were the people to see, not only for property but for financing and all the little extras that Schooner, well-connected on every level, could provide. Schooner and Plotkin were heavy into SPOUT. Henry was now a pillar of the community, on the boards of the hospital and a bank, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and Episcopal Church, and an alderman.

  “My alderman?” Orville said aloud now to himself. “That jerk is my a
lderman?”

  “What’s wrong with that, Mr. Bigshot Doctor? He’s goyim, but nice.”

  Selma was floating low over the front walk, just off the edge of the porch, dressed in a yellow golf skirt, red blouse, and pink hat with a purple tuft on the top. She carried a golf club, maybe a wedge.

  “You?”

  “Yes, and you did a nice job up there at the hospital, though let’s face it, with that mother and her son you could have been a lot nicer. Try a little tenderness, will you? I know it’s hard for someone like you, but try.”

  “Did you give your letters to Henry to mail? Is he the one?”

  “Letters? Moi?” She smiled coquettishly, a full smile—her facial nerve hadn’t yet been cut, or had healed after death. “Adios, bubbula! Fore!” She flew up, up, and away.

  Orville sat on the porch staring at the dark sky into which she’d vanished. Warm laughter from Schooner’s snapped him back to his senses. Suddenly he felt lonely, left out.

  He walked across the square back to the party, and found them all in the oak-paneled den. Burnished, tasteful, costly antiques furnished the room. Henry was standing in front of the mantelpiece. Something had changed. Instead of everyone talking with everyone, everyone was listening to Schooner. All attention was being paid to him. More than attention. The others were rapt, awed. Even Faith, who was swaying, but listening. What was going on?

  World affairs was going on. Someone would ask about the recent terrorist bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that had killed 250 soldiers. Schooner had done a tour of duty in Beirut, and answered, “Our nation is the greatest force for good in history. The bad guys can’t stand it. Thus, this tragedy of the peacekeepers—our brave fighting men.” Two days after the bombing, the president announced that American armed forces had invaded Grenada. Many Americans thought that the rapidly aging patriarch must have misspoken. Surely he meant that they invaded Lebanon. An easy mixup, Lebanon, Grenada. Three syllables, sound a lot the same, no one really knew where either of them were. But no, Grenada it was, wherever it was. And Schooner knew exactly where Grenada was, from his tour of duty in the region: “a small island in the Caribbean with a dangerous pro-Castro Communist faction building an airstrip.”