by Shem, Samuel
Orville ran the fingers of his mind over the five syllables of that “Affectionately,” a braille that brought back the music of her voice. “Affectionately”—it seemed like a lot. He kept the card in his pocket as he fought through the days and nights of butchery, replaying that music in his mind. It wasn’t “Love,” but in the face of his growing rage at what he had gotten himself into, doctoring Columbians alone, it was a comfort.
Awaking the next Sunday morning after only two hours’ sleep, Orville felt a bee sting of pain about Celestina, closely followed by a hit of rage at the latest letter from his mother, which had been awaiting him when he’d gotten home from the hospital at 3 A.M. But then he settled into a glow of, yes, affection for Miranda, for what he saw as her groundedness, her living out a kind of historical accuracy, her authenticity. So unlike Celestina, with her fuzzy flights in the name of karma or dharma or whatever, with her secrets, her surprises, and her lies. Her betrayal—how meeting a rich banker had turned her “just two weeks more, caro” into forever.
The day dawned badly, an overnight mist sheening a first snow with ice. Driving and footing were treacherous. The night wind had been from the Universal Atlas Cement Plant, out past the storied hamlet of Katieville, so the town was covered with cement dust. Not only trees, houses, and cars but Columbians themselves, out shoveling or salting, were turned to dusty, ghostly shades. The cement dust mixed with the moisture in the air to coat the windshields of cars and trucks left out overnight with a thin sheet of cement. Water wouldn’t touch it. The only way to remove it was to dissolve it with vinegar. This left the whole town smelling vaguely like a green salad gone bad.
As Orvy worked his windshield with vinegar, he watched the procession of dust-colored Columbians snaking their way across the icy, slippery Courthouse Square toward mass at St. Mary’s. He pictured their pulmonary alveoli—imagine what this cement shit is doing to all of our lungs.
That Sunday’s historical site was the Quaker Meeting House, down Coffin from the Square. For the first time in their several Sundays, Amy would not be with them. She had a rehearsal for the Christmas opening of The Greenie Sellers Midsummer Night’s Dream. After that first day at the Worth, Amy had gotten fanatical about saving the hotel. Just last week The Columbia Crier published a front-page photo of Amy and Miranda and Mrs. Tarr picketing on the future site of Milt and Schooner’s dream development.
Milt had gone ballistic, Penny all acid. Amy refused to talk to them. They asked Orvy to dinner to give some advice. While Penny and he sat at the table, Milt had taken Amy aside, down into the sunken living room. Orville and Penny watched Milt, on the verge of an explosion, patiently explaining the situation to his daughter. His hands traced logical fiscal scenarios of healthy urban development in the air of the all-beige kiva. Finally he sat back, inviting his daughter’s response.
“You’ve got bad breath,” Amy said, and stormed up, and out, to her room.
Milt blew. “No horses or drama-shit with that faggoty dwarf Sellers forever!”
“How can you date her?” Penny shouted at Orville, over Milt’s raving.
“I’m not dating her, I’m just walking with her at—”
“Take it from Milt and me, she’s a character!”
“What’s wrong with that for Chrissakes?”
“Character stands in the way of progress!” Milt shouted. He seemed surprised at having said this and more calmly added, “And so forth.”
“Just what this world needs, eh, Milt? Another Price Slasher?”
“Yes.”
“Well, good luck, Milt. I hope you make a mint.”
“As they say in Yiddish, Orvy: From your lips to God’s ear.”
Now, outside the Quaker Meeting House, Orville offered his arm to Miranda as she got out of her car. The curb and walk were icy. For him, the feel of her leaning on him brought back the times that his mother, dizzy from her as-yet-undiagnosed brain tumor, would suddenly lurch into him, holding on for dear life. For a boy, a shock.
Miranda, leaning on so many arms in her lifetime, could read a lot in the Samaritan’s touch. Now she picked up Orville’s struggle, thinking of Selma telling her how her son had helped her to balance. But Miranda had a lot else on her mind. In the weeks since Cray’s “Plez See My Hart” note, sometimes he had in fact allowed her to do that, but mostly not. He seemed to have gotten argumentative, a little lawyer. Her other friends who were mothers told her that it was typical for a six-year-old, this lawerly arguing his way out of even her smallest request. But she found it hellish. Her historian’s mind labeled them “The Cray Wars: The Daily War of the Wakeup for School” or “The Great War of the Turning Off of the TV” or “The Eat Your Apple War” or “The Seasonal War of the Wearing of Your Winter Coat.” She wondered if Cray sensed that something new was up with her on Sunday afternoons. Usually she had stayed at his soccer games to watch, but the last several Sundays she hadn’t. Miranda had not told him why. Given her penchant for secrets, and her unwillingness to risk involving her son in this temporary little history with Orville, she felt it was better to hide it.
Separately and privately, Miranda and Orville shared an excitement about seeing each other again this Sunday. But when they actually did meet at the curb, shyness dusted them, graying them both. Alone together for the first time since the meeting in the schoolhouse, without Mrs. Tarr or Amy as their human vinegars, each saw the other with that pale cast of their own inner worry.
Bravely, they each tried hard to go against their natures. They said to themselves things like, “When you say hello, look into his eyes,” or “Make a casual remark about how she looks or what she’s wearing.” But it was awkward. In just a few careful steps across the icy sidewalk small talk became big silence. Each of their minds filled with variants of “What the hell was I thinking of, saying yes to this?” or “Okay I’ll just try to make it through this final Sunday politely and that’s it.” Wordlessly they went into the Meeting House.
The Meeting House was a tiny single room. Two windows next to the door were mirrored across the room by two looking out into Prison Alley. Old, worn, varnished benches formed a square around nothing. The benches were covered with dark blue cushions. A child’s small plastic tricycle was parked in a corner. Few Quakers were left in Columbia. Five sat there around the square, as if around a boxing ring with the fights long banned. They were sitting in silence. Miranda and Orville joined them.
An elderly man spoke up about a young woman killed by a drunken driver two nights before out near Bell’s Pond. Orville had seen the mangled body, pronounced her dead. The man told the victim’s story. She’d led an exemplary life of service, doing Quaker missions for peace in Central America in the Witness for Peace program, protesting President Ronald Reagan in his first six months in office in 1981 using the CIA to secretly assassinate, via an exploding helicopter, the elected president of Ecuador, Jaime Roldós, and two months later, in an exploding light plane, the elected president of Panama, Omar Torrijos, and ever since then to secretly run the Contra war in Nicaragua. After Nixon and ’Nam, Orville thought it couldn’t get worse. But now, in what was happening and the slick denial that it was happening at all, it was starting to.
A woman spoke of organizing a nonviolent local protest against the president’s building five thousand new nuclear bombs and basing new “Peacekeeper” missiles in Europe.
More silence. They left early, leaving the others sitting there. Out on the street again, Miranda and Orville now felt not only shy but gloomy. So far the day was a dud. Together they faced but one question: Now what?
“How was that for you?” she asked in order to say something.
“Busy mind, going flit flit flit flit help! I’ve had better meditations.”
“You meditate?”
“I did. Not much since I’ve been back. I did in Italy.”
“What was her name?”
Orville
was startled. “Celestina Polo.”
Miranda heard in the way he said it his love for her. She thought, Okay, lady, you and he are nothing—be generous. “As my son would say, ‘Awesome name.’”
“Used to be. It’s over. Thanks to my mother and Columbia.”
“How’s that?”
He told her about the terms of the will and of Celestina’s stalling and then dumping him for a Swiss banker. He didn’t mention Selma’s letters or her flying around or the Worth’s seeming to plead with him.
And then a funny thing happened. Something about how she was looking at him, with such attentive curiosity, set him off. He told her about the hellish time he was having being back in town doctoring the Columbians. He talked about guns, about the endless drunken car crashes that left innocent Witnesses for Peace who’d never done anything wrong in their lives in smudges of blood and bone and guts and brain on the pavement, about the alcohol and drugs and muggings and violence as bad as anything he’d seen anywhere, hey maybe even as bad as on TV—and he talked about how everybody seemed to want to deny that it existed.
“I’m the guy at the bad end of it all!” he cried out, standing there on the icy street. “I’m the one they call to sew them up, cast their bones, pronounce them dead. I’m the one called in for a dose of reality and I’m sick of it! Do you know how much effort it takes just to sew up a wound, let alone try to repair a blown-off leg? How many years—hard, disciplined years—it takes to learn it? I put out enormous effort, superhuman effort on a daily basis, and they put out none! The Columbians eat crap and lie around like pigs and smoke so the nicotine makes them feel a little jazzed up while the carcinogenic tars mix with the PCBs from the river and the cement dust to destroy their lungs and livers, and then they say to themselves, ‘Gosh, I think I’ll go to the doctor!’”
He tried to stop himself but couldn’t.
“The irony here is that the Columbians act in what they think is their own self-interest, and wind up doing exactly what will hurt themselves the most! The true Columbian is always shooting himself in the foot. And who’s my alderman? Who’s gonna probably run for Congress? Henry Schooner—the neo-Nazi of my childhood. I’ve had it! Columbians, in total selfishness, do the worst things for themselves and I damn well don’t want to be the guy that tries to patch ’em up anymore! Breakage! Self-centeredness! Looking Out for Number One! I mean, Jesus Christ, where’s the kindness, the compassion for the other guy, Looking Out for Number Two? What about taking care of somebody else? Taking care of your neighbor, your town? Me and Bill try to care for bodies and maybe minds, but we’re just treating symptoms, not anything that matters, not souls—we’re just pissing in the ocean! It can’t be just you and Mrs. Tarr, no matter how great a lady she is. God knows it can’t be the children, the Amys of the world. I’ve had it. I’ve got nine months and change left trying to deal with this human breakage and then I am history! Every day I feel like giving up and running away again and the only good thing I’ve found here is you!”
YOU . . . You . . . youyouuuu echoed between the houses on Coffin.
Miranda felt a kind of zing go through her body, leaving her tingling all over, all senses heightened, deepened. For the first time since her husband’s death, she knew that a man loved her. He was looking away, embarrassed, as if he felt he’d lost her—at the moment he’d found her! She couldn’t speak.
Orville was sure he’d blown it. The silence killed him. He watched a pickup truck approach, on its front bumper a sticker saying DRIVER CARRIES NO CASH—HE IS MARRIED, and on its back bumper MY CHILD WAS INMATE-OF-THE-MONTH.
He turned back to Miranda, ready to say good-bye. To his surprise, she was smiling. She seemed to be trying not to laugh.
She was trying not to laugh. She said only, “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes!”
“Yes, what?”
“You got it. For as long as anyone can remember or kept written records, Columbians have been just as you describe. For two hundred years it’s been the most mean-spirited, self-destructive little town that anyone else has seen either. It’s been known for that! I’ve researched this for my thesis—‘The Columbian Spirit’—and the more I learn, the more I feel like, at this moment, the way you look.” She stared at him—standing there with his jaw dropped and eyes wide—and laughed, more freely now. “That look of—what? Incredulity? Disbelief?”
“No, no, no—belief!”
“Exactly! Sometimes I sit there reading the documents and I say, ‘Oh my God, they didn’t!’ You see, it’s hor—” She couldn’t suppress her laughter. “It’s horrible! C’mon.” She crooked her arm for him to support. He took it.
She drove them up Washington and then north on Fourth to the Columbia Area Library, a two-story building made of chiseled limestone blocks all glazed golden in the noon light, with a central Federalist body and two symmetric wings. As they got out and walked toward the entrance, she told him that it had been built in 1818 as an almshouse in tardy and resentful compliance with a state law of 1778 that forced towns to take care of their poor, then in 1830 it became the first insane asylum in America, in the Quaker tradition of trying to be humane with the lunatics. Next, when the State Asylum in Utica opened in 1850, it was refurbished as the Columbia Female Academy, where the great painter Henry Ary taught young ladies art, and then—as Orville must have known from his childhood—it became an orphanage.
“The Orphanage,” he said, looking at it afresh. “I remember. Ominous, back then.”
He helped her up the granite steps to the door guarded by two stone lions—miniatures, it seemed to him, of the two grand lions in front of the New York Public Library, the meeting point for him and his ex-wife, Lily, whenever they were in the City.
Miranda took out a key and unlocked the door and flicked on the lights. She led him upstairs to a tiny room labeled “Archives,” its tables covered with notes and typed manuscripts.
“This is where I work,” she said. “Have a seat.” He faced her across the table.
She told him that the early history of the Dutch and the Indians was full of folly. A ferry built at the exact spot on the east bank of the Hudson that guaranteed that its most direct route west across the river would be blocked by an island, Middleground Flats. A waterwheel at Kleek’s Pond for grinding grain, fed by a stream that, in the dry months of the harvest, was too enfeebled to turn it. A bigger waterwheel at the same stream, which worked worse. Von Hogeboom’s Giant Windmill, for grinding grain, built on the highest point of Cemetery Hill, caught the wind beautifully but was so high up that few wagon teams could reach it. But, she pointed out, such follies were not uncommon in such towns at such times. The New World, after all, was learning. The unique Columbian spirit was something else: a comic genius for self-destruction.
“We left off in 1803,” Miranda said cheerfully. “The religious utopia of the Quakers is coexisting nervously with the sexual circus of the whores. Things don’t go well. By 1837 the town is broke. Asked to increase their tax payments, Columbians refuse. Instead, the town sells off all the land encircling it to the hamlet of Spook Rock. This ensures that, forever after, the town will always be broke—its tax base is capped.”
“Columbians strangled Columbia?”
“Good phrase—I’ll use it. Soon Columbia becomes known as ‘a finished city.’ Ignatius Jones, a native son returning home in 1847, writes a memoir—Whither Columbia?” She opened a book and read. “‘An all-pervading air of listless indolence, and a Sabbath-like stillness, hung like a pall over what I remembered as busy, lively, bustling streets. Columbians are reluctant to risk one farthing for the common good.’” She closed the book and went on. “In 1859 oil is discovered by a wildcatter in Titusville, Pennsylvania—soon making whale oil worthless. The Quakers begin to leave. The remaining Columbians are offered money by the railroad to lay tracks across the two deepwater bays, which will destroy fore
ver the possibility of Columbia being a port. They take the money. The bays turn into swamps, breeding pestilential insects. By the end of the Civil War the Quakers are gone, leaving the utopia in the hands of the whores and gamblers. In 1866 fires destroy much of Washington Street. Columbians are asked to finance a bond to buy a steam fire engine to replace a hand-operated pump. They vote ‘No.’ 1867 sees the town spending less than a third of what any other town its size in the state spends on itself. In 1876 there are schools enough for only half the children, which leads to truancy and crime, and when Columbians are asked to approve a bond issue for more schools and teachers, they vote ‘No.’ Columbia is the last town in the state to have a board of education or a public library. I mean, Andrew Carnegie was giving away money to every town in America to build libraries in the early 1900s. Even we, in tiny Boca Grande, Florida, population ninety-three, took the cash and built a library. Columbians were offered the money and voted ‘No.’ You know when this place became a library?”
“I never thought about it. Maybe when I was in high school?”
“In 1961! Last in the state. Dead last.” She shook her head in puzzlement. “But the most amazing thing, I think, is the Columbian attitude toward light. I’ve really gotten into light.”
“Tell me.”
“Since 1797 there are gas streetlamps. But Columbians don’t want to spend the money to keep them lit. They’re only lit on nights when The Farmer’s Almanac predicts there won’t be much moonlight—sixteen nights a month, six hours a night. Never mind that even on the nights of moonlight there might be clouds or rain or snow. No light. By 1855 the town runs out of money again and shuts off the gas in the lamps. Columbians are outraged. Until they are asked for a special tax levy, at which point they say No. The streets stay dark. Gangs of young hooligans roam at night. Fires get harder to fight.” She paused and winked. “But all is not lost. Finally, Columbians rally!”
