Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

by Peter Orner

  Probably what is most remembered, if anything, about Mike Pampkin during that campaign was an incident that happened in Waukegan during the Fourth of July parade. Pampkin got run over by a fez-wearing Shriner on a motorized flying carpet. The Shriner swore it was an accident, but this didn’t stop the Waukegan News Sun from running the headline: PAMPKIN SWEPT UNDER RUG.

  My memory of that time is of less public humiliation.

  One night, it must have been a few weeks before Election Day, there was a knock on our back door. It was after two in the morning. The knock was mousy but insistent. I first heard it in my restless dreams, as if someone were tapping on my skull with a pencil. Eventually, my father answered the door. I got out of bed and went downstairs. I found them facing each other at the kitchen table. If either Pampkin or my father noticed me, they didn’t let on. I crouched on the floor and leaned against the cold stove. My father was going on, as only my father could go on. To him, at this late stage, the election had become, if not an actual race, not a total farce, either. The flying-carpet incident had caused a small sympathy bump in the polls, and the bump had held.

  Yet it was more than this. Politics drugged my father. He loved nothing more than to hear his own voice holding forth, and he’d work himself up into a hallucinatory frenzy of absolute certainty when it came to anything electoral. One of my earliest memories is of my parents having it out during the ’72 presidential primaries. My father had ordained from on high that Scoop Jackson was the party’s savior, the only one who could rescue the Democrats from satanic George Wallace. My mother, treasonably, was for Edmund Muskie, that pantywaist. There were countless other things, but doesn’t everything, one way or another, come down to politics? In my family, politics isn’t blood sport, it’s blood itself. Finally, in 1979, my mother, brother, and I moved out for good, to an apartment across town. But every other weekend and Wednesday nights I spent with my father in the house that used to be our house, in the room that used to be my room, in the bed that used to be my bed.

  My father in the kitchen in October of 1980, rattling off to Pampkin what my father called “issue conflagrations,” by which he meant those issues that divided city voters from downstaters. To my father, anybody who didn’t live in Chicago or the suburbs was a downstater, even if they lived upstate, across state, or on an island in the Kankakee River. He told Pampkin that his position on the Zion nuclear power plant was too wishy-washy, that the anti-nuke loons were getting ready to fry him in vegetable oil.

  “Listen, Mike, it doesn’t matter that Cheeky Al’s all for plutonium in our cheeseburgers. The only meat those cannibals eat is their own kind.”

  Pampkin wasn’t listening. He was staring out the kitchen window, at his own face in the glass. He didn’t seem tired or weary or anything like that. If anything, he was too awake. In fact, his eyes were so huge they looked torn open. Of course, he knew everything my father was saying. Pampkin wasn’t a neophyte. He’d grown up in the bosom of the machine, in the 24th Ward. Izzy Horowitz and Jake Arvey were his mentors. He’d worked his way up, made a life in politics, nothing flashy, steady. Mayor Daley himself was a personal friend. And when the Mayor asks you to take a fall to Cheeky Al, you take a fall to Cheeky Al. That Daley was dead and buried now didn’t make a difference. A promise to Mayor Daley is a promise to Mayor Daley, and there is only one Mayor Daley. Pampkin didn’t need my father’s issue conflagrations. He was a man who filled a suit. Didn’t a man have to fill something? At the time he ran, I think Pampkin was state comptroller, whatever that means.

  So the candidate sat mute as my father began to soar, his pen conducting a symphony in the air.

  “So we go strong against nuclear power in the city on local TV here. But when you’re down in Rantoul on Thursday, make like you didn’t hear the question. Stick your finger in your ear. Kiss a baby, anything—”

  “Raymond.”

  Pampkin seemed almost stunned by his own voice. He was calm, but I noticed his cheeks loosen as if he’d been holding my father’s name in his mouth. Then he said, “My wife’s leaving me. It’s not official. She says she won’t make it official until after the election. She’s in love, she says.”

  My father dropped his pen. It rolled off the table and onto the floor, where it came to rest against my bare toes. I didn’t pick it up. On the table between the two men were precinct maps, charts, phone lists, mailing labels, buttons, and those olive Pampkin bumper stickers so much more common around our house than on cars.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee, Mike?”

  I watched my father. He was gazing at Pampkin with an expression I’d never seen before. Drained of his talk, he looked suddenly kinder. Here is a man across this table, a fellow sojourner. What I am trying to say is that it was a strange time—1980. A terrible time in many ways, and yet my father became at that moment infused with a little grace. Maybe the possibility of being trounced not only by Cheeky Al but also by the big feet of Ronald Reagan himself had opened my father’s eyes to the existence of other people. Here was a man in pain.

  They sat and drank coffee, and didn’t talk about Mrs. Pampkin. At least not with their mouths. With their eyes they talked about her, with their fingers gripping their mugs they talked about her.

  Mrs. Pampkin?

  My inclination before that night would have been to say that she was as forgettable as her husband. More so. Though I had seen her many times, I couldn’t conjure up her face. She wore earth tones. I remembered that once she hugged me and that she smelled like bland soap. She wasn’t pudgy; she wasn’t lanky. She wasn’t stiff, nor was she jiggly. Early on in the campaign, my father had suggested to Pampkin that maybe his wife could wear a flower in her hair at garden events, or at the very least lipstick for television. Nothing came of these suggestions, and as far as I knew, the issue of Pampkin’s wife hadn’t come up again until that night in the kitchen, when, for me, she went from drab to blazing. She’d done something unexpected. If Mrs. Pampkin was capable of it, what did this mean for the rest of us? I remembered—then—that I had watched her after Mike got hit by the carpet. She hadn’t become hysterical. She’d merely walked over to him lying there on the pavement (the Shriner apologizing over and over), and the expression in her eyes was of such motionless calm that Mike and everybody else around knew it was going to be all right, that this was only another humiliation in the long line that life hands us, nothing more, nothing less. She’d knelt to him.

  Pampkin’s hand crept across the table toward my father’s. Gently he clutched my father’s wrist.

  “Do you know what she said? She said, ‘You have no idea how this feels.’ I said, ‘Maureen, I thought I did.’ ”

  “More coffee, Mike?”

  “Please.”

  But he didn’t let go of my father’s wrist, and my father didn’t try to pull it away. Pampkin kept talking.

  “You get to a point you think you can’t be surprised. I knew a lady once, a blind lady. Lived on Archer. Every day she went to the same store up the block. Every day for thirty-five years. She knows this stretch of block as if she laid the cement for the sidewalk herself. It’s her universe. One day they’re doing some sewage work and some nudnik forgets to replace the manhole cover and vamoose. She drops. Crazy that she lived. Broke both legs. It cost the city four hundred thousand on the tort claim to settle it. I’m talking about this kind of out-of-nowhere.”

  My father sat there and watched him.

  “Or let’s say you’re on Delta. Sipping a Bloody Mary. Seat-belt sign’s off. There’s a jolt. Unanticipated turbulence, they call it. It happened to a cousin of Vito Marzullo. All he was trying to do was go to Philadelphia. Broke his neck on the overhead bin.”

  When I woke up on the kitchen floor, the room looked different, darker, smaller in the feeble light of the sun just peeping over the bottom edge of the kitchen window. Pampkin was still sitting there, gripping his mug of cold coffee and talking across the table to my father’s shaggy head, which was facedown and d
rooling on the bumper stickers. My father was young then. He’s always looked young; even to this day, his gray sideburns seem more like an affectation than a sign of age. But early that morning he really was young, and Pampkin was still telling my father’s head what it was like to be surprised. And he didn’t look any more rumpled than usual. Now, when I remember all this, I think of Fidel Castro giving those eighteen-hour speeches to the party faithful. There on the table, my father’s loyal head.

  I was fourteen and I woke up on the floor with a hard-on over Mrs. Pampkin. One long night on the linoleum had proved that lust, if not love, had a smell, and that smell was of bland soap. I thought of ditching school and following her to some apartment or a Red Roof Inn. I wanted to watch them. I wanted to see something that wasn’t lonely. Tossed-around sheets, a belt lying on the floor. I wanted to know what they said, how they left each other, who watched the retreating back of the other. How do you part? Why would you ever? Even for an hour? Even when you know that the next day, at some appointed hour, you will have it again?

  Got to go. My husband’s running for governor.

  Pampkin droned on. He had his shoes off and was sitting there in his unmatched socks, his toes quietly wrestling each other.

  “Or put it this way. An old tree. Its roots are dried up. But you can’t know this. You’re not a botanist, a tree surgeon, or Smokey the Bear. One day, a whiff of breeze comes and topples it. Why that whiff?”

  I couldn’t hold back a loud yawn, and Pampkin looked down at me on the floor. He wasn’t startled by the rise in my shorts. He wasn’t startled by anything anymore.

  He asked me directly, “You. Little fella. You’re as old as Methuselah and still you don’t know squat about squat?”

  I shrugged.

  Pampkin took a gulp of old coffee. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

  And either I stopped listening or he stopped talking, because after a while his voice got faint and the morning rose for good.

  Pampkin died twelve years later, in the winter of ’92. (The obituary headline in the Chicago Sun-Times ran: AMIABLE POLITICIAN LOST GOVERNOR’S RACE BY RECORD MARGIN.) I went with my father to the funeral. The Pampkins had never divorced. We met Mrs. Pampkin on the steps of the funeral home in Skokie. All it took was the way they looked at each other. I won’t try to describe it, except to say that it lasted too long and had nothing to do with anybody dead. They didn’t touch. They didn’t need to. They watched each other’s smoky breath in the chill air. Facing her in her grief and her wide-brimmed black hat, my father looked haggard and puny. He turned away only after more people came up to her to offer condolences. I don’t know how long it went on between them. I’m not even sure it matters. Does it? I now know it’s easier to walk away from what you thought you couldn’t live without than I had once imagined. She was taller than I remembered, and her face was red with sadness and January.

  “Don’t look so pale, Ray,” she whispered to my father before moving on to the other mourners, her hand hovering for a moment near his left ear. “Mike always thought you were a good egg.”

  LINCOLN

  That year we lived on W Street in a small one-story house with a concrete slab in the backyard. Everybody else on our block lived in similar houses, and during the long summer we spent afternoons sitting in chairs on our respective slabs. In the Midwest, we don’t appreciate fences. Yards should blend into yards. I don’t remember any of our neighbors’ names, only that we sometimes drank a few beers together and talked about the heat. There are so many ways to talk about heat. I was an adjunct in the English Department. Sam was a poet who didn’t believe universities and poetry had anything to do with each other. She got a job at the Golden Wok, waiting tables. The Golden Wok was cheap and open late, a big sprawling place that had a way of looking empty even when it was filled with people. It was there she met someone, whether a fellow waiter or a patron, I never asked. Lincoln used to be a beautiful city. This was before it got ruined, locals said, by too many expressways. Nebraska, apparently, can never have enough roads through it. Still, there were the sunken gardens with all the flowers in a bowl and the mansions up on Sheridan Boulevard. Sam and I would drive up there and look at the houses. Once, she pointed to one of the houses and said, in all seriousness, Who would we be if we lived there?

  “Coupla of rich-ass Cornhuskers,” I said.

  “That’s all?”

  Sometimes I think of that house. It had what Sam called a porte cochere over the driveway. Sam was from the South and said such dumb open garages were common in South Carolina.

  “They’re for hairdos, you know, to protect the ladies when it’s raining.”

  Near our house on W Street there was a park with a couple of netless tennis courts, and I used to sit at a picnic table under the tall trees and read for class. I remember sitting there and reading the Time Passes sections of To the Lighthouse and coming, again, to that moment when Mr. Ramsey reaches out for Mrs. Ramsey in the dark of the morning corridor, not knowing that she’s already gone. How could it still jolt when I knew it was coming, when from the first page I knew it was coming? Lincoln, Nebraska, 1999, the tall trees, nobody playing tennis.

  LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE

  In the unquiet of his shoe-box study, amid the noises of his house, Walt tries to read. Walt Kaplan. Furniture salesman, daydreamer, reader. It’s 1947, a year no one will much remember. After the war, but before anybody really got used to the war being over. He gives up. How could anybody read in this asylum? The peck of the clock nicks away his flesh. No matter how much I eat, he thinks, it makes no difference. I’m a fat husk. A funny thing. Sarah’s downstairs on the phone: the phone. Such fathomless yappery. Why, why must she shout? Is everyone who rings this house in need of orders? And there is the thump of Miriam’s battering up and down the stairs. Eleven years old and the kid sounds like a platoon. And he aches for her. He always has. So that somehow hearing her is the same as not hearing her is the same as her gone. What? Kid this loud? Possible? Gone? Such cacophony. I am a morbid man, a morbid, lazy sloucher. He shouts, “Knock it off, Orangutan! You got a father in here thinking.” The kid doesn’t answer. So he talks to Sarah without talking to Sarah, which is one of the great advantages of being married so long. Cuts down on the need for superfluous conversation. He talks to the idea of her. She talks on the phone.

  I’m talking fundamentals, Sarah, follow me? You make something in this world, take, yes, a child, and then? Then?

  Don’t be daft. We got bills to pay and cocktails at the Dolinskys’ at eight.

  Dolinskys? What could we possibly have to say to them that hasn’t been said?

  We can’t be late. Doris made reservations at the Lobster Pot for quarter to nine. They’ll give our table away.

  So much for mine wife’s wise counsel. Not that I don’t enjoy a good cocktail as much as the next man. Glenlivet for me, thanks. Nobody can say Walt Kaplan doesn’t have a certain amount of class. But listen: What I’m getting at is silence and what it means in a world where there’s not any, at least we think there’s not any, but we got a whole lot coming, you know? I tell the kid, Knock it off, Orangutan, you got a father in here thinking… and if the kid heard, which even if she did, she didn’t, she might have stopped at my door and spoken through the keyhole and said, Thinking about what, Daddy? And I might have said, I’m remembering things, which is hard work. You think remembering things is a peanut, Peanut?

  Remembering what?

  Lot of things. For instance the hurricane of ’38, when I, your father—

  That story!

  You think a story dies?

  (Her little mouth breathing through the keyhole.) Five hundred times I’ve heard that same story.

  Five hundred and one, five hundred and two, five hundred and three. Your mother is home here in Fall River, and you and I, Orangutan, are out on the Cape at Horace’s place in Dennis. A little father and daughter vacation from the dragon, and the dragon calling up and squawking, Di
dn’t you hear the weather? Get out of there! Evacuate! You’ll get swept to—

  China, the kid would say through the keyhole. We’re always getting swept to China in this family.

  Precisely! And Walt Kaplan knows who’s boss. The man takes good orders, and he blankets you up. You were two years old and your feet were like a short fat man’s thumbs. I ever tell you that? That your feet were like a short fat man’s thumbs? Every time you tell anything, you have to add something new. And your father, great and fearless father, carries his daughter to the mainland in his Chrysler Imperial steed. Last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the hurricane of ’38 sent half the Cape into the Atlantic. They called it the Long Island Express. New Yorkers got to have their nose in everything. They even take our disasters. Rhode Island blew away, too, but nobody noticed. What’s half of Rhode Island anyway? Is your mother never wrong? No—she hasn’t got the time. She’s got Louise Greenbaum on the line. Paging Sarah Kaplan. Sarah Kaplan. Louise Greenbaum on the line. So, yes, hail the Sultana! But salute the infantryman, too. Walt Kaplan, hero of the Sagamore Bridge. Write him down as a footnote in the annals, hearty scribes!

  And so Walt sits in the unstillness of his shoe-box study and thinks about fundamentals.

  You make a kid, and the wind comes and tries to air mail it to Asia. Insurance got Horace a new house. The claim: Act of God. Act of God? State Farm’s going to send me a new kid? That only happens in the Book of Job. Last car, Walt Kaplan, dodges the terrible wrath of wraths, but how many more to come? How many acts has God got left? What on earth compares with the shame of not being able to protect your daughter, your only only? Let a father weep in peace, Orangutan. That fuckin’ thumping. Hellion child. The devil’s spawn. Sarah, my yappery-yapperer. Not the clock that dooms us, but the us of us. We’re walking, talking Acts of God. Don’t you get it? The thumping will not echo. It only booms in the brain, in the silence which is nowhere. A grave has more hold than the noise of this house. Miriam’s feet tromp up and down the stairs. You say I don’t get out enough, that I waste my life’s blood cooped up here being morbid, being stupid. Sarah? Sarah? You hearing me?