by Shem, Samuel
“Simply had to meet you and thank you.”
“For what?” Orville asked.
“For your splendid mother. Selma quite single-handedly piloted the movement to save us. The last remnants of Church’s family had let the thing go and it was in rather abysmal shape. They were about to sell it as an ordinary house—imagine! Selma took charge and called me. Together we held bake sales and harassed our fascist congressman. She was tenacious, staying with it during some quite high winds, if not tornados. Yes, yes, we stayed with it together and resurrected it, as almost a postmodern passion play. And now it is a National Historic Site, a treasure for the ages.” He sighed, a happy man. “She was a force, a powerful lady. What she set her sights on, she got. One wouldn’t dare disagree with her, would one?”
“It’s tough to, yes.” The present tense startled him.
“Yes, she was a force of nature. Ironically, she was much like what Church painted. Sorry, but if you’ll permit me, your mum was quite the ‘Niagara,’ and . . .” he took out a hankie and blew a surge of emotion from his reddened nose into it, “she not only supported me, she accepted me. When no others did.”
Orville could almost see him in a Selma letter: “Nice, but queer.”
“You must be very proud,” Durney said.
“I must be. Thanks.”
Durney stared at him intently and then smiled. “Church was such an oddball! The man didn’t fit in anywhere, really, except here in Columbia. Here, a lot of oddballs have, and do.” He winked—he actually winked! “See you at the unveiling next week. Bye-bye now.”
She’s everywhere! Orville thought, walking toward the door. He remembered Penny saying something about setting a date for the “unveiling”—the Jewish ceremony to unveil the tombstone on the first anniversary of the death. Gotta ask her when it is.
They walked out the Moorish arch into the soft sunlight. The door squeaked closed behind them. The bus had eaten the blue-haired ladies and was grinding down the hairpin slope toward the lowlands and home. Unwilling to leave just yet, Orville led Amy around the corner of the house.
The sudden panorama stunned them. To their right, to the north, the high waves of the ridgeline of the Catskills against the reddening sunset flowed down from Albany. Shading their eyes they could see, far below, sparkling in the sunlight like a silver nail laid across a glittery ribbon of river, the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. To the south, down past the friendly neon of Mike’s Pizza and on toward Red Hook, the Hudson ballooned out, a small inland sea, mimicking several of the paintings they’d just viewed. Turning east, they saw a heart-shaped reflecting pond that Church had designed to balance the shape of the ballooned-out river, the apex of the pond’s ventricle leading the eye down through an arbor of a hundred or so of the 40,000 trees he had planted, and then their eyes traveled further east, hopping over the spewing smokestacks of the Universal Atlas Cement to the easy green vista slurred in the fading and damp light of the Taconic Hills and the Berkshires. Breathtaking.
“Holy moley!” Orville said.
“Cool! C’mon!” Amy took off across the lawn, running and then tripping and rolling and lying on her back. Orville strolled over. He took out a Camel, lit it, and lay down on his back beside her.
“You shouldn’t smoke.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
“Can I have one?”
He gave her a look. They put their hands behind their heads. They looked up at the clouds passing across. They said “Mmmm” responsively, in delight.
“You’re really leaving?” Amy asked. He nodded. “Can I go with you?”
“What?”
“I need a break from here. When my best friend Eliza moved to New Mexico it was bad enough—without her, I don’t know if I can stand the boys in my class next year! And since Miranda left, it sucks—I worry about her and Cray a lot!” She leaned up on one elbow, looking intently into his face. “I wanna go with you. You can convince Mom, I know you can, please?”
“I don’t even know what I’ll be doing yet.”
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll start in Rome with Celestina. But at first we won’t live with her, no. We’ll get a nice little apartment near the Spanish Steps—no, wait—on the Piazza Navona, my favorite, favorite place!”
“How do you know so much about Rome?”
“Milt and Mom and I did Rome when I was little. So, then, we’re living there, and I’ll take Italian lessons and you’ll work at a free clinic and at night we’ll have dinner really, really late and then maybe—hey, yeah—we’ll put on little plays at the Piazza Navona for the tourists!”
He stared at her and laughed.
“I mean it!”
“I know.”
“Take me seriously, will you?”
“I will. I am. Sounds great, but I’m not sure it’s right for you, Ame.”
“But I’m like dying here!”
He saw in her eyes that she, like he, in fact was. “Okay, I’ll—”
“Yes!” she said, raising her fist in triumph.
“Wait! I’ll ask Penny. But she’ll say no, and I can’t kidnap you. It’s illegal.”
“Shit,” she said, lying down on her back. “Okay, but can I at least come visit you?”
“Sure. Every vacation.”
“And can I stay with you at Grandma Selma’s ’til you leave?”
“What about camp?”
“I hate it.”
“What about ‘Finding Your Voice Without Boys’?”
“The boys come over all the time from the other side of the lake. It’s a joke.”
“Why are they on the other side of the lake?”
“They go to an all-boys’ camp run by the same jerky people, a ‘Finding Your Warrior Camp’ or some garbage. Can I stay with you?”
“I work all the time.”
“Yeah . . . Hey, I got an idea! I’ll work in your office—I’ll be your receptionist. You don’t have one, right?” He said right. “And we’ll live in your house and it’ll be fun!”
“Yes, it would. Okay. Maybe Penny’ll agree to that.”
“First ask her if I can leave with you, and when she says no, ask her the other.”
“You know, for a kid, you’re pretty smart.” She beamed. “I’ll do my best.”
They lay there for a few moments in silence, watching the sky.
“Why’re you going?” Amy asked.
“Except for you, there’s nothing to keep me here anymore.”
“Since Miranda left?”
“And Cray.”
“You guys were really, really in love, right?”
“All three of us, yep.”
“So what happened?”
Without thinking he said, “Our handicaps didn’t match.”
“Whoa! That’s heavy.”
“Yeah. Broke my heart.”
“Have you heard anything from them?”
“Nothing.”
She laid her head on his chest. They watched the clouds, sailing across like ghosts.
“So you’re leaving because of her?”
“Her, yeah, but there’s more, Amy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s about a vision. One day when I was six, I lay on my back like this, alone out in a field, and looked up and saw the clouds like that and I had a vision.”
“Cool. What vision?”
“That the world wasn’t just about what you see and hear and feel and all of that, but that there was something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what, but the words I heard were, ‘something else.’”
“Like God?”
“Maybe. Something else that was whole, of which I was just a part. If I were to try to name it now, I’d say something ‘Divine.’”
“Far out.”
“Maybe not. I was so excited by this vision, I jumped up and ran home to tell my mother. And I told her and she said, ‘Sorry, Orville, but there’s nothing else but this.’”
“Selma?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Bummer.”
“So, anyway, I’ve been trying to hold on to that vision all my life, Ame, and when I was away, working for Doctors Without Borders and running around the world and falling in love with Celestina in Italy—almost exactly a year ago now—I could hold on to it a little bit. And I felt, I don’t know, like I was worth something, you know? Because I was part of something else.”
“I felt that when I was young, too, yeah.”
Orville smiled. “But what I’ve found, being back here, is that it’s really hard to keep holding on to that vision. If I stay here much longer, it’ll die. And a long time ago I decided that before I would let it die, I would die.”
They were silent again, and peaceful.
“Do you think, Uncle O., that Grandma Selma’s vision died?”
He was taken aback. Not only at the question but at Amy’s love—no, not the love, the empathy. Amy’s ability to flip over into Selma’s world, see Selma’s lost dreams, the flip that he simply could not make, even after everything.
“Know what, Ame?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a miracle. Let’s roll.”
“But you didn’t answer me.”
“Kid, you picked that right up, didn’t you? My answer is I’ll do everything I can to convince Penny to let you quit camp and move in with me and be my receptionist. And with Selma’s money, when I leave I’ll be able to bring you over to Europe anytime, even for a weekend if you need me. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Cool?”
“Way.”
“Let’s go!”
Orville dropped off Amy at home and idled the bike through the twilight back down to the Schooners’. He parked it and walked up onto the porch under the gold-painted ceiling and then on in through the unlocked front door.
“Hello? Anybody home?” He knew Henry and Nelda Jo weren’t, but maybe the kids were. No answer. He left the key on the kitchen table and headed back out.
For some reason he paused in the den, poured himself a bourbon and a beer chaser, and lit a Monte Cristo cigar. He flumphed himself down into Henry’s big leather chair facing the wobbly breakfront and the big blank TV. He had dropped in.
He thought, So this is what it’s like to be Schooner? Yeah, must be. But what is it, to be Schoonerish?
He sat, looking blankly out for a long while. Finally he said to himself that maybe what it is, after all is said and done, is to be blank. That’s it, that’s all, just kinda blank. Waiting for Godot or Nelda Jo—whatever.
The blankness was so vivid he soon dozed off, to be awakened minutes later by the ringing phone, ringing and ringing until the answering machine cut in.
“Hi, Eagle, Sancho here.”
Orville recognized the voice of Milton Plotkin, brother-in-law.
“All systems go for the demo tomorrow at oh-six-hundred.”
The machine clicked off.
For a second Orville was astonished, mesmerized with disbelief. They wouldn’t . . .
And then he believed. They were going to blow up the Worth Hotel.
He was furious, enraged at having been duped. He pictured, again, Henry standing before the angry crowd at the public hearing just a few months ago, calming, reassuring, proposing a stay of execution for the grand old hotel until the end of the year, asking that as a community they not do anything rash or in haste, that they all give the Worth Saving folks a decent chance to raise the necessary “monies.”
A lie, all a total lie. As soon as the chance had presented itself to them—Miranda gone, Mrs. Tarr deep in mourning over the death of her cat and the disappearance of her friend, and Orville giving up—they arranged to destroy it.
It all rushed in on him—his first sight of the forlorn three-person picket line that first evening he’d walked into town, his meeting Miranda at the schoolhouse with their sweet good-bye of “Worth Saving, yes!,” Amy and him joining the cause, the town meeting. Now, gone. All the air went out of him, in one long breath out. He sank, deflated, into the worn leather. His anger turned to defeat. First we lose each other, and now we lose this too.
He felt powerless, sad, thinking of Miranda, knowing what saving the hotel had meant to her. He stared around the Schooner den, at the perfectly decorated walls, at the massive breakfront, the impenetrable TV. He felt the silent desolation of this beautiful old house that had seen an awful lot of ugliness.
Chance, followed back far enough, is fate. Miranda had told him that once, talking about history, her green eyes alight with mischief. Chance.
All at once things shifted. He felt a glimmer of hope, a flutter of relief. Rising up out of the clutches of the soft leather, he faced the glass of the breakfront.
“Okay, you assholes. Now it’s my turn. Thanks for the chance. I’m gonna make my move!”
· 27 ·
The dewy red air of dawn. Silence. Orville lit another Camel and sat back in his rocker, staring across Washington Street at the Painted Lady Lounge. For the past few hours, things had been quiet. As town doctor, he’d come to know some measure of truth of the Columbians, maybe even of Columbia itself. He could sense all around him the dream town, the town the Columbians collectively were dreaming. This, he thought, is the only utopia. Timeless, placeless, tethered lightly by the gossamers of REM sleep to the historical place. He imagined most of the dreams—compared to what the dreamer would awaken to—to be sweet. He imagined that the dreaming Columbians were attending civic functions and having things work perfectly, and that they were fit and thin and sober and nonsmokers and well-off and kind and had no need to go to a doctor. These utopian dreams were a bountiful history of good things to come.
Sound. According to Celestina, quoting the Vedantas, sound came before anything else in the creation of the world. Sound came first now, in the creation of the day. A car coughing alive, racheting into gear, moving downhill into the South Swamp toward a job while a tanker tooted past the rotting lighthouse in the river alongside the same Middle Ground Flats of the idiotic horse-ferry-to-nowhere fame, two hundred years ago. An alarm clock, a radio, a tune, an argument, a light in a window across the way and a silhouette of a sleepy, stoop-shouldered Columbian.
Orville saw first light on the gold ball atop the flagpole to his left at Parade Hill, reflecting the rays of the sun pulling itself up out of the covers of Massachusetts and walking over the brow of Cemetery Hill.
B-dangg! Bang!
The explosion of heavy machinery starting up, down on North Second. Coming closer. Massive metal. Diesel-powered massive gears, shifting first to second, second to third, groaning along heavily up Washington in the gauzy light. From his days as a toll collector on the Rip Van Winkle, Orville recognized the sound. A heavy flatbed trailer hauling something heavier. Coming closer.
And then there it was, moving in from his left like a wall, the float carrying a big crane with a black wrecking ball tucked under its lowered arm like an elephant tucking a black fruit into its mouth. It stopped directly in front of him. Scomparza Demolition and Upholstery.
“What the fuck?” A man followed these words out of the cab of the flatbed. Orville recognized him as a patient of his, Jeffrey Liebowski, of Ukrainian descent, deep descent. Bill had gotten his little boy to stop pooping in Jeffrey’s motorcycle helmet.
“Holy shit!” This voice belonged to Officer Packy Scomparza. “Hey, Doc, whatchu doin’ here?”
A flash of light, and another, and another. Packy and Jeffrey turned toward Toby oop den Dyke, who, with one of those sophisticated news cameras, was snapping away, capturing the moment for the afternoon edition of The Crier.
“Aw shit, man,” Jeffrey said. “Shit.”
“Fuckin’ A, Orvy,” said Packy, “didya have to?”
Toby snapped a few more photos. “Thanks for the tip, Orvy,” he said. With a cheery wave, whistling “Some Enchanted Evening,” he left.
“So what the hell you think you’re doon?” Packy asked.
“Meditating.”
“In chains?”
“Jesus was, wasn’t he?”
Packy thought about this. “No joke.”
“What’re you doing here?” Orville asked.
“Detail. Traffic detail for the demo.”
A truck with a few other workers stopped by. A car stopped, then another. A small crowd started to blossom. People stared.
“Hey, Jeffrey,” Orville said. “Who told you to demo this?”
“We got orders.”
“From who?”
“Look, man,” Jeffrey said, “we got orders not to tell who we got orders from, okay? And if we don’t demo this baby right now our ass is grassed, you get me?”
“I do, and too bad.”
“Yeah, man,” Jeffrey said, “and who told you about this, man?”
“Milt.”
Looks of astonishment from both of them.
“Milt?” said Liebowski in surprise. “Fuckin’ A!”
“Wait, wait,” Packy said. “Wait. Milt who?”
“Milt Plotkin, my brother-in-law.”
The workers looked at each other.
Liebowski said, “Holy shit.”
“You can say that again,” said Packy.
“Holy shit.”
“Unbelievable, y’get me?” Packy turned back to Orville. “I mean, chains?”
Chains they were, and Orville was locked into them. The biggest chains and most impenetrable padlock he could find. He had taken his grandmother’s rocker from the house and popped it into the trunk of the Chrysler and at three in the morning had driven down to the General Worth Hotel.
