by Shem, Samuel
Schooner’s answers were calm, expert, humble, brief, sure, and telegenic. Clearly he had been touched by the magic of TV. He had, in fact, been on TV several times, commenting on the crisis. He was now a TV personality. Parlaying his recent links to national security and intelligence, Schooner had become an authority and a star.
All five of us, Orville realized, are deferring to him.
He seemed bigger, taller, in command. Orville could almost see tiny flecks of glitter, the glitter of fame bestowed in the studio by the TV camera, as sometimes you see bright glitter on a woman’s cheek the morning after a party. With a sense of horror Orville understood that the next time Schooner was on TV there would be a redoubling of this process, more magic TV dust would anoint him, leaving more left to rub off here at home in person. Schooner would be even more a person to be listened to than before.
And if someone in the group disagreed, well, Henry would take this in and gently but surely turn it to his cause.
This went on until Nelda Jo said, “They want old Henry to run for Congress this year, but I said only if he buys me a Ferrari and a week in Venice, Italy, and the boys one 37-inch TV each for their rooms.”
“Do you take Visa?” Henry asked.
Everyone roared.
“Why Congress?” Milt asked. “Why not the whole enchilada?”
“Damnright,” Faith slurred, “runfer the goddamn Wide House.”
Henry considered this. “Maybe, someday. My job now is to help our sweet little hometown. Let’s face it, my friends, we in Columbia have problems. The mayor, the other day, said to us aldermen that Columbians are CAVE people, you know C-A-V-E?”
The dinner guests asked what did these letters stand for?
“Citizens Against Virtually Everything!” Laughter. “We all got our work cut out for us. And nobody knows that better than our good doctor. He sees the worst of us, and he’s tryin’ like hell, with that great old guy Bill Starbuck, to make us better.”
The party broke up. Orville was impressed at how well the Schooners ended their party, disengaging slowly with just the right words, as if they never wanted their guests to leave. Henry suggested to Milt and Penny that they bring their kids and guns out to the Federation of Polish Sportsmen’s Club for a turkey shoot and barbecue again soon.
“You’ve got guns?” Orville asked Penny, startled.
“You got to, the way things are. We’re trying to get Amy interested, but she’s in between the Schooner boys and won’t play with either.” A knowing glance. “Yet.”
“Milt, too?” Orville said, stunned.
“Just a deer rifle, for hunting season,” Milt said. “And a 9-millimeter pistol.”
“Jews with guns,” Orville said indignantly. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
“Tell it to an Israeli!” Milt cried out drunkenly. “Talk about tough mothers. Two eyes for an eye! Teeth for a tooth! Never again!”
Faith tugged hard at Orville’s arm, making him lose his balance and sending him into a floor-to-ceiling heavy antique breakfront, which wobbled ominously as if it, too, were loaded and about to crash to the floor.
“Whoa! Dangerous!” Orville said. “An accident waiting to happen. You oughta get that trued up, Henry.”
“Thanks, Doc!” Henry said delightedly. “My man will see to it tomorra.”
Wobbly himself from the booze, Orville dimly felt Faith pressed tightly to him out on the porch, everybody saying good night to the excellent Schooners.
“Henry,” Orville said mockingly, “you’re a great American.”
“Thanks, old friend,” Henry said, taking it as a compliment. “Can’t tell you how much it means to me and my family that you’re back home, and that you came to our home tonight. It’s a start, a good start, and I look forward to keepin’ this friendship goin’.”
“Come back ’n’ see us, Doctor,” Nelda Jo said, hugging Orville hard, so that he felt those grapes pressing through her thin fabric and his thin shirt, muscats set in breasts firm as mangoes. “Or I’ll be all over you like white on rice!”
“Works for me,” Orville heard himself reply.
“Be good, you two!” Schooner called out.
“Be bad!” Nelda Jo called out after them. “Go for it! Feel the burn!”
As he walked across the square holding up Faith, Orville looked back at Henry and Nelda Jo, side by side, arms around each other under that golden globe of a porch light, waving them on to good luck in sex.
Orville was horny and drunk, Faith drunk and willing. But no. Celestina was way too much with him. He put Faith in Penny’s old bed, he in his own. His last thoughts, as boozy sleep slid down over him like a big eyelid over the day: I’m a young man with a bright future hidden somewhere in my past. It’s hard to be a doctor for a town that you despise. And why in the world does Henry Schooner care about earning my respect?
· 8 ·
Honey-bunny,
Hiya! How are you? I imagine I’m fine. Heaven can’t be worse than life, can it? I can’t imagine I’m in Hell.
By now you’ve settled in, so you and I can get comfy and talk. Your sister always talked to me, except when she was going through her adolescent phase with that Scomparza boy—Catholic, but nice. But you never did. Here’s a question: Why, in all the photos Sol took of the family, you’re never smiling? He always said things to make us smile, the usual “Say cheese” or one of his dumb jokes. Never worked on you, oh no. Were you depressed? Just thought I’d ask.
By now I bet you’ve got a girl. My guess and hope is that the lucky one is Rebecca Shapiro, sister of the nice young doctor. Not the most attractive girl, but smart. It takes a special kind of girl to become a CPA don’t you agree? Her brother the doctor told me she’s a tiger in bed, so you might look into her. Tigress. But I tigress. I hope you find a nice Jewish girl—except that Faith Schenckberg! Do not—repeat—do not mess with her. Jewish, but a tramp. For once, listen to me. Like with dessert: do not indulge.
Orville put down the letter in disgust, his head throbbing. It was eleven Sunday morning, the day after the Schooner party. He felt like shit. His tongue felt like an army had marched across it during the night, and his head like it was now marching through his brain, up over the gyri, down into the sulci, using spare fissures for latrines.
Facing Faith in the morning had been tough. In the glare of daylight the tracks of her plastic surgery—nose job, chin tuck—were all too apparent to his doctor’s eye. They’d sat across the table at a breakfast of strong coffee, aspirin, untouched halved grapefruits, and cigarettes.
Faith had wanted to chat, Orville did not. He’d tried to be polite but felt that if he didn’t get her out in twenty minutes he would plunge a serrated grapefruit spoon into her heart, or maybe into his own. Secretly he’d had himself beeped for “an emergency,” and with a promise to see Faith again soon, he’d ushered her out.
He picked up the letter and read on:
Love is a many-splendored thing, but then there are the Sols of the world. I never told you this, but as soon as Penny was born I decided I’d had enough of Sol. But I couldn’t go through with it. Was I a coward? Well, it was wartime and for all his faults the man had a certain earning power. But I’ll never forgive him for dragging me to Columbia.
I bet you’re practicing with Bill. I mean, what else would you do, sell toys? Bill’s Christian, but nice. Nice man, terrible doctor. I went to him with that pain in my groin and he gave me that Ointment of Starbusol, so I went around even to social functions smelling like a pine tree and it turned out to be a hernia! And all my years of dizziness and tinnitus in one ear that he misdiagnosed as inner ear until I went to Sinai and they found the brain tumor. So that’s another reason I brought you home: Good health care for Columbians. But I’m writing for another reason: suicide.
Do you know it runs in the family, on my side? (Sol’s side is full
of pathetic, meshuggeneh optimists.) You know Aunt Bernice who supposedly “fell” in the kitchen? Nope. Head in the oven. You remember in the Old Country my father’s father Abraham, at the height of his success selling hides to the Russian Army for the Japanese War, supposedly died in combat? Wrong again. Slit his own throat. Do you know how blue I used to get, not hearing from you, not even a postcard or a call? Knowing you were angry at me? I got suicidal, too, you bet. Old people think a lot about death. Getting old is not for sissies. Especially disfigured and handicapped, from all those nerves being cut. “Do you have hobbies?” someone asked me the other day. “No, I have doctors.” Sol tried hard, taking me on trips, but he never took me on my dream trip—doing Russia, that boat trip down the Vodka. So, suicide. You never understood me, never. I was brave, and well-informed. You don’t really know about life until you’re dead, and now I am (well, not now, but now) and now I do. So read every word as if it were carved in stone, like Genesis was, and treat me right—which, for you, would be a first!
Love Mom
Orville threw the letter aside. He poured himself a Dickel on ice and cracked a Budweiser—neither seemed enough, on its own—and glanced out the kitchen window to make sure she wasn’t flying around.
Well, she was and she wasn’t. There she was, more hovering than flying. Outfitted for travel—brown worsted jacket and skirt, pumps, navy blue pillbox hat. She looked tired, bedraggled. He stared at her.
“Of course I’m tired, doll, I just flew in from the coast.”
“The Gulf Coast? The condo in Naples?”
“The West Coast, Hollywood. It’s not easy, flying all the way cross-country on a broomstick! Haha!” She floated away over the copper dome of the courthouse.
Dead, she’s funny? Relieved that Bill was taking a call, he picked up the phone and dialed Celestina in Rome to make final arrangements for her arrival the next day.
It rang for a long time.
“Ja? Ja? Sprechen?” A man’s voice—groggy, as if just awakened. It was five in the afternoon in Rome.
“Celestina? Celestina Polo? Is Celestina there?”
“Vait.”
Ohhh shit, Orville thought, waiting. And waiting.
A rustling, maybe sheets. “Pronto?” Celestina.
“It’s me.” His heart was pounding.
“This is not the very good time to talk.”
“Okay.” He tried to stay calm. “I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”
“Bad news.”
“What?”
“Hold, per favore.” A phone moving, a door closing. He felt his heart fall into his gut, as when, with her in Orta, he’d gotten the telegram of his mother’s death.
An extension picked up. Celestina said, “I cannot come tomorrow.”
“What do you mean? You’ve got to come! You have no choice but to come!”
“I’m going to Nepal.”
“Nepal?” He was screaming. “With a German?”
“Swiss.”
“You can’t. I won’t stand for it. I’ll come.”
“It is not what you think. The banker owns half an elephant. In a hidden valley filled with yogis and monks. It is the chance of a lifetime, a spiritual journey. Rafting. Venture capital for the all-Euro sangha! Not for me, for the dharma. It is life, caro, life—either you grab it or you miss it.”
“Wait. Hold it.” He breathed. “I’m breathing.”
“Good. I feel your sensual breath through the very phone.”
“What about us?”
“I love you still with all my heart.”
“Well, then come! Come here! Don’t go to Nepal!”
“I will be back. I will come to you. I promise.”
“You’ve been promising for three months!”
“But it seems like only yesterday that we were in Orta, no?”
“No. It seems like a year! I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. For a German?”
“A Swiss. In the war, they were neutral.”
“In that war, they were neutral.”
“I feel your hurt, but I—”
“Hey, it’s simple, baby. I love you. Come.”
She was crying, sobbing. “Dearest one, my heart is breaking.”
“Then come. Come now.”
She hesitated. “Tomorrow I leave for Nepal. When I come back, perhaps—”
“No. If you don’t come tomorrow, it’s over. Either you grab it or you miss it.”
“Then I shall miss it now. But it is merely now. Carissimo, arrivederci! Always remember, it is—”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“—a gift.” She sobbed.
“But I can’t live—”
Click.
Orville stood there dazed, the phone buzzing in his ear. Then, frantic, feeling he had forced her to choose when she was holding open the choice, he frantically redialed. The phone rang and rang. He redialed again. It rang and rang. He hung up.
Suicide? He had barbiturates, a needle, good veins. A strange thought came to his mind: I’d kill myself, but I don’t want to make my mother happy.
He began pacing around the dead house. Pacing, pacing.
Everything’s falling apart. Gotta get out of this house. Run.
Going out the front door, black bag in hand, he saw a sight that blasted him again. The Family Schooner Raking Leaves. Two blond boys were being chased around the front yard by the athletic blond mom, all three diving into the big pile of leaves and scattering a rainbow up into the autumn air, while the white-haired dad stood by, smiling, in one hand a rake, the other cradling a pipe out of which an enticing, even healthy, wire of smoke arose as if hooking into a higher good, even a common good. Schooner saw Orville and waved gaily, gesturing to his neighbor to come join the Sunday fun.
A molten pulse of envy hit Orville in his solar plexus, sparking the filigree of tiny nerves to fire, knocking the breath out of him. He staggered, trying to hide it from Schooner. He hoisted his black bag as an explanation.
Schooner gave him a thumbs-up and then a clenched fist “Go for it!” The pipe stem pointed to the heavens.
Heart in shreds, feeling transparent and with no idea of who he was now or what he was doing except that he was mortally wounded and alone with the pain, Orville reflexively raised his own fist and smiled.
He closed the coffinlike door of the Chrysler on himself and was filled with self-loathing. He smashed the steering wheel as hard as he could, feeling a welcome pain in his fists and screamed at himself, “Asshole! You asshole! You jerk!”
Driving aimlessly around what now seemed remarkably desolate and ugly countryside, sometimes enraged and screaming and banging the steering wheel and sometimes feeling as sad and lonely as all the men he’d doctored as they’d died with no one else there—in the end, from the whole world, no one else there!—he tried to keep afloat. He found himself way out on 9H, driving fast past Lindenwald, the home of President Martin Van Buren whoever he was, and then whizzing past a small pond bordered with two peculiar tiny old houses—one brick, one white clapboard. For some reason he stopped, turned around, and went back.
In the parking lot was an old, beaten-up Ford station wagon with fake wooden paneling, a Country Squire. On its bumper was the message WORTH SAVING. The sign on the brick house read LUYKAS VAN ALEN HOMESTEAD 1737. On the white clapboard one, ICHABOD CRANE SCHOOLHOUSE 19TH C. An old woman with her gray hair in a badly done bun beckoned him to the homestead.
On his suicidal afternoon off, Orville was not ready for old women in badly done buns. He skulked into the schoolhouse.
A single small room. Rows of kid-sized one-piece wooden desks and chairs, facing, to his left, a blackboard above which hung a nineteenth-century American flag, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and A Dog and A Cat. Across the room were two tall windows, half-ope
n. The room, like all the distemperate schoolrooms of his past that had been either too hot or too cold, was too hot. Through the century-old glass the red-leafed maples and white birches wobbled.
Orville put a fingertip into a groove carved in a desktop, tracing a Cupid’s heart and arrow linking one JS & SB. Feeling a rush of sorrow for these long-dead children and whatever was now dying inside himself, he raised his eyes to the windows to get away, to get out, and lifted his hands to his chin, his fingers on his cheeks as if they could keep things in place, aligned, alive.
His hands dropped to his sides, hanging down helplessly. His nose clogged up and his throat ached dryly, presaging real tears, and for the first time since his divorce from his first love—from innocence itself, really—he lost the fight and stood there with tears easing down his cheeks. He felt he had lost his place in the world—no Celestina, no Lily, no real friends, even—nothing to run away to anymore, but nothing to stay for either. No place in the world and a lot of time left.
All at once he sensed he was not alone. He turned. In the corner to his right, a woman sat at a desk.
Their eyes caught and held. Hers, in the low light from those two west-facing windows, glinted a fresh light green. Her hair was bright red, pulled back into a girlish ponytail, and her skin was that redhead’s cream, sparsely freckled. Revealed by her sleeveless scoop-necked dress, the muscles of her shoulders and neck seemed prominent for her slenderness. She’d made up her eyes with care, liner and shadow, which seemed strange, to make your eyes up for a lonely volunteer Sunday afternoon where she might encounter only a few blue-haired ladies or some lumbering dodoes looking for some free activity for their kids. Her plump scarlet lips were pursed, and her head was tilted in curiosity. It seemed terribly still in the room, as if time had stopped, leaving something else.
