Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

by Peter Orner

  The kid’s gonna die, Walt. I’m gonna die. You’re gonna die. Tell me something else, you genius.

  Don’t laugh at me, woman.

  You want me to start weeping now? This minute? We got cocktails at Dolinskys’ at—

  That’s it. I’m asking you, I’m really asking you—how is it possible that we aren’t in a permanent state of mourning?

  I ironed you a shirt. It’s on the bathroom knob.

  Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn’t a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can’t, I won’t, because to save her once isn’t to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn’t silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can’t hear you.

  PART II

  The Normal

  NATHAN LEOPOLD WRITES TO MR. FELIX KLECZKA OF 5383 S. BLACKSTONE

  Castaner, Puerto Rico (Associated Press, April 7, 1958)

  Nathan Leopold is learning the technique of his 10 dollar a month laboratory job in the hospital here and using most of his spare time to answer his voluminous mail. One hospital official said the paroled Chicago slayer has received 2,800 letters in the three weeks he has been here, from all parts of the United States. He has expressed his intentions to answer every letter.

  The room is not as bare as you might imagine. In fact, it’s crowded. A distant relative in the furniture business shipped a load of overstock from the Merchandise Mart. Sofas, love seats, end tables, floor lamps, a pool table. It took three trucks to deliver it all from San Juan.

  Nathan, home from work, sits at a large oak desk, big as a banker’s. He takes off his shoes. He rubs his feet awhile. He watches his canaries. The birds are, for a change, silent. He leaves their cage door open. He likes to watch them sleep, their heads up, their eyes vaguely open, as if on a whim they could fly in their dreams.

  He takes another letter from the pile and sets it in front of him. He puts on his glasses. He reads.

  When he’s finished, he brings his hand to his face and gently rests his index finger on the tip of his nose. The room has a single window that looks out upon the village and, beyond it, a small mountain. When he first arrived here, it was heaven. The spell was short-lived. He no longer feels the urge to walk across the village to the mountain and climb it.

  Dear Mr. Kleczka,

  I received your correspondence two weeks ago. Please accept my most sincere apologies. I receive a great many letters and am doing my best to reply with a reasonable degree of promptness. Also, note that the mail delivery services here in the hills outside San Juan leave a bit to be desired. Among other things, you call me God’s revulsion and express the wish that I choke on my poisonous froth. You write that my employment in a hospital is the ghastliest joke Satan ever played and, as a veteran of Hitler’s war, you know from whence you speak. I do not doubt you, Mr. Felix Kleczka. You write from what you describe as the old neighborhood. Let’s not indulge ourselves. I am not going to tell you about the last thirty-three years. I want you to know that I believe–I am sure this is something even we can agree on–I am the luckiest man in the world. I am free and nothing you could imagine is more delirious. Yet, delirium, I might add, always gives way to a fog that never lifts. This said, allow me to describe a bit of my work at the hospital. I met a woman today. She is dying of a rare disease. It is not pancreatic cancer, the doctor assured me, but something far more uncommon. The disease is untreatable, and the most that can be done for this woman is to prescribe painkillers and ensure a constant supply of nutrients to the bloodstream, because, apparently–this is the way I understand it–her body rejects those fluids necessary for the survival of her vital organs. In other words the patient is leaking away. Her name is Maya de Hostas and she has two children, Javier and Theresa. There is no husband to speak of. Maya de Hostas is dying, Mr. Kleczka, but it is a slow process. The doctor says it could take more than six months, perhaps a year. Do you scoff? Do you tear at this paper? Do your hands flutter with rage? Nathan Leopold is telling a story. Nathan Leopold is telling a story of other people suffering. You remember my youthful arrogance like it was yesterday. All the brains they said I had. All the books I’d read, all the languages they said I spoke. Russian, Greek, Arabic. They say I even knew Sanskrit! My famous attorney glibly talking away the rope. I still repeat his speech like a prayer. The easy and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients. It is men like you, men with long memories, that make our–your–city great. You sweep the streets of scum like me. This is no defense, Mr. Kleczka of 5383 S. Blackstone, but allow me to tell you I love you. I love you for keeping the torch lit, for taking the time to write to me. I am deadly serious, oh deadly serious, and as I sit here–the waning moments of light purpling the mountains–I imagine you. I imagine you reading of my parole with such beautiful fury. You want to come here yourself and mete out justice. Don’t you want to get on a plane and come and murder me with your own bare hands? No gloves for such a fiend. And then take a vacation. Why not? Bring the wife and kids. It’s Puerto Rico. But your wife says an eye for an eye wouldn’t help anybody and certainly wouldn’t make any difference to Bobby Franks. It wouldn’t bring that angel back, and they’d only throw the key away on you. (Though, of course, your defense would have much to say by way of mitigation.) But the fiend, you cried. Animal! Your wife is a wise woman but you, Sir, are wiser. There are times, of course, when only blood will suffice. Should you make the trip, know that my door is always open. I live in a two-room flat. If I’m absent at my employment, please wait for me. Make yourself at home. Don’t mind the chatter of the canaries. I feed them in the morning. I keep whiskey, though the conditions of my parole forbid spirits, in my third desk drawer. Why not pour yourself a glass? And know that as you strangle me or slash my throat or simply blow my head off, I’ll love you. As I bleed onto this unswept floor (the maid comes only on Tuesdays), I’ll love you. Mr. Felix Kleczka of the old neighborhood. What else can I say to you? Do not for a moment think I say any of this slyly. I have been waiting with open eyes and open arms for the last thirty-three years, prepared to die the same death as Dickie Loeb, whose rank flesh is only less tainted than mine for being done away with sooner. Only maggots know the truth. Well, I am here. I will never hide from you. I get a great deal of mail, as I said. Much of it is supportive of my new life. This week alone I received three marriage proposals. Your letter reminded me very starkly of who and what I am. Even so, I must ask you: Are there still old neighborhoods? Are there still people who knew us when? And should you decide not to come and take up the knife against me, know that I think no less of you. Your cowardice, more than anything, this I understand. Once, a young man bludgeoned a child with a chisel. To make certain, I stuffed my fist in his mouth. My hands are rather plump now. Still, I recognize them for what they are, some days.

  Sincerely,

  N. Leopold

  Dark outside the window now. Night heartens. He’d lived so long craving light. Those first few weeks, it was the light, all that immortal light.

  Now he’s satisfied with a lamp. He flicks it on for comfort. He watches his face in the window. His laugh begins softly, like a murmur. Eventually it will be loud enough to wake the birds.

  At the end of our street was a commune in a log mansion–Jed Holson’s house–and girls in frayed orange cable-knit sweaters and no pants would chase each other across its enormous furnitureless rooms. It was the suburbs, it was the seventies, life was bizarre and glorious, and we didn’t even know it. Jed’s father, Elijah Holson, had been a founding director of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. In 1918, he built himsel
f an eighteen-room house of locally hand-hewn oak on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. He dug a moat around the house and put down a drawbridge. A grand house, a famous house, a house for the ages. The son was even more eccentric. In the spirit of his own time, past seventy himself, Jed Holson went hippie. His wife fled to California, and Jed opened his father’s mythical log palace to all female comers. Long-haired men were welcome, too. The lawn was crowded with VW buses and tents. People did their laundry in the moat. Jed’s doctor lawyer banker neighbors didn’t know what to make of all the parties. It didn’t matter. They weren’t invited. By the time I was old enough to enjoy the show, Jed–his crazy beard, his experiment in alternative living, his passel of nymphs–was forgotten. The log house went dark. Free love, old hat. As a kid, I used to climb up and pace the front porch, ghosting back and forth in front of the big windows, waiting for the flesh and the laughter. Jed must have been asleep somewhere in the gloom, his chin sunk in a tangle of yellow beard.

  HIGHLAND PARK, ILLINOIS, 1981

  DETAMBLE

  They tore down the house on Detamble, but this has never mattered. We see that house every time we drive by. It happened more than thirty years ago. A childless couple. A childless couple who had always, the Sun-Times quoted a neighbor as saying, kept to themselves. Did they truly keep to themselves? Or is it only with hindsight that we see such people in their isolation? The husband was a retired ear, nose, and throat specialist; the wife was a horticulturist at the Chicago Botanic Gardens on Lake Cook Road. It might have taken them longer to find them if not for the dog. On the night of the third day, the hunger got to be too much, and her howling finally alarmed the neighbors. They went over and rang the bell. When they got no answer, they called the police, who used an ax to break in a side door. The husband and wife were found in the garage. (The dog, an Afghan hound, was found locked in the basement.) The only signs of struggle were bloody scratches on the wife’s arms and cheeks. The husband had no defensive wounds. This led investigators to conjecture that he had been taken by surprise, while she had seen it all coming. The other clues were that both of them had their heads stove in by some type of batlike object. It may have been the fireplace poker, the only material thing, as far as anybody could tell, missing from the house. The only other compelling piece of evidence: the wife, the horticulturist, was found wearing a money belt that still contained $20,000 cash.

  “Bookies,” our neighbor to the east and town opinionator Penny Buckholtz surmised. “Everybody knows, after a certain point, it’s too late to pay them back with money. And I, for one, always knew something wasn’t right about those two. Why no kids? People who live in the suburbs without kids to raise are always hiding something. Why else would they live here?”

  Penny Buckholtz may have had something there, and this is pretty much how we all took it. Must have been some kind of gambling debt. Don’t mess with the mob. You think they respect a suburban border? You think they care this is Lake County? No matter how mild-mannered you seem, they’ll take care of business the only way they know how.

  There are no more memorable details and no other reasons to remember this couple aside from the way they died. We hadn’t known them. We hadn’t even known them well enough to make up stories about them, except of course Penny Buckholtz, who never had any compunction about making up stories about anybody, murdered or unmurdered.

  It is tempting, after so long, the file long since closed, to zero in on the dog. Dogs are sympathetic. In a lot of stories dogs are even more sympathetic than people. For hours and hours, there’s that confused, whimpering, sleeping, pacing, foraging, and finally hopelessly yowling dog. Maybe the story is the dog and how alone she was, and how silent the house seemed. Those two had always been quiet, but no voices at all is different from silence. The silence worried the dog more than hunger. The woman had a small sad way of laughing that the dog could always hear wherever she happened to be in the house. The dog would always run toward that laugh.

  It should be said that the murders, in spite of their brutality, didn’t terrorize us. We didn’t lock our doors any more than we had before. Everybody knew this wasn’t the beginning of a crime wave. No omen. It was simply an aberration. Our town has always been a safe place to raise your kids. Detamble, like so many of our leafy streets, is peaceful. Nothing ever happens on Detamble. It’s mathematical. But don’t you need some sort of break in the normal for there to be normal in the first place? The normal, the leafy, the peaceful, reaches out and bludgeons. A kind of sacrifice so the rest of us can slumber on amid the trees, on the bluffs, by the lake.

  DYKE BRIDGE

  Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, 1976

  My brother and I in the knee-deep water, standing in the tidal current, under Dyke Bridge. We are hunting whelks. Yes, it is the water Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in. I know all about it. About Teddy drunk and how the story of what happened was less covered up than simply muddled. What was there to cover up? Her body was found in his car. My brother told me. How Teddy was still mourning his brothers, both his brothers, and that he drank too much. Not that this excuses what happened, my brother says. But wouldn’t you drink if somebody shot me in the head? And then your other brother? If you had another brother? Wouldn’t you drink a whole hell of a lot and probably crash a car?

  We are on vacation with our parents on Martha’s Vineyard. We are from Illinois. It is classy, according to my parents, if you are from Illinois to take a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s also Kennedyesque. My parents are still married (to each other), though my brother and I would prefer this not to be the case. We have ridden our bikes out to this bridge to see this very spot, to muck around in this famous water. My brother is wearing a T-shirt with the face of Senator Sam Ervin, the hero of Watergate, on it.

  I want to remember that we were alone, that it was only the two of us, but somewhere, in some stack of pictures, in some cabinet in my father’s house, there are pictures of my brother and me standing under Dyke Bridge, so it must be that at least one of our parents was with us and recorded it, and since my mother rarely took pictures, it had to have been my father; but let’s leave him out of this. Just my brother and me in the knee-deep water and my brother telling me that Teddy was heading back to the island that night, back from the even smaller island where they’d been at a party. That he was driving a black Chevrolet, because the Kennedys may be richer than God but they aren’t ostentatious. And that Mary Jo Kopechne wasn’t even very beautiful. She wasn’t Teddy Kennedy’s wife, either, he says, but that goes with this territory.

  What territory?

  The territory of being richer than God, my brother says. The landscape of sex and whisperings and innuendo.

  I would rather fish up a whelk than listen to this, a live whelk with a black body inside, a Jell-O-ish squirmy thing that we will take back to our rented house and boil alive on the stove.

  Even so, I ask, how much not very beautiful was she?

  And my brother says, Not particularly unbeautiful. Just not that beautiful for a Kennedy. She wasn’t Jackie, is what I’m trying to say. But anyway, nobody was Jackie. Even Jackie wasn’t Jackie. Anyway, Teddy may have even loved her though he hardly knew her. Especially after she asphyxiated.

  What do you mean?

  My brother stares at me for a while. He and I have the same eyes, which is sometimes creepy. You don’t know yourself coming and going, as my grandmother used to say. Then he squats in the water and takes up a couple of handfuls of ocean water and raises his hands as it flows through his fingers. Don’t we sort of love what we kill? my brother says. What about the whelks?

  Our bikes are on the bridge, leaning against a broken piling. Dyke Bridge is tiny, a miniature bridge. It is not much bigger than the width of a Chevy and nearly the same length. Driving off it is the bathroom equivalent of falling out of the bathtub.

  I e-mail my brother and ask him if he remembers all this. He is still very sensitive when it comes to the Kennedys. Like my mother, he remains
a staunch believer in the notion that the New England wisdom embodied by the Kennedys and their aristocracy of sorrow will save this doomed country yet. My brother works in Washington.

  Why exaggerate? Why tell it worse? What happened isn’t enough? Yes, it’s a dinky bridge, but it’s bigger than a bathtub. I remember. We were out there with Dad. He took pictures. He thought the whole thing was hilarious. He kept saying, Be careful not to step on Mary Jo’s face.

  And furthermore, my brother says, I should not, even over private electronic communication (remember: don’t use my .gov address for things like this) provide aid and succor to the haters who still love to dredge this story up out of the muck. Remember Chappaquiddick! Let the man rest in peace. And anyway, he says, why don’t you just pick up the phone and call me? Why do you e-mail your brother?

  I write: E-mail gives the illusion of dramatic distance. Pretend I’m in Shanghai or somewhere.

  He replies: Anyway, isn’t anything drive-offable if you put your mind to it? Or even when you don’t, especially when you don’t? He was tanked, what’s the story? You’re going to pass judgment? Look at your own life.

  My brother is right. He is right. Even when he is not right, he is right. Look at my own life. And nothing he has ever told me have I forgotten.

  It is only that something happened there, under that bridge, where my brother and I once swam. As things do, as they always have, so many more things (strange things, impossible things) than we can even begin to imagine. Dream it up. It already happened. One minute you’re drunk and laughing and your hand is on her bare summer thigh and there’s nothing but tonight ahead, and the next, the car is upside down and water’s flowing in through the cracks in the windows and the car’s like a big fat grounded fish and there’s this woman—what’s her name?—flailing her arms in the darkness and trying to shout but no sound is coming out of her mouth, and you wonder for a moment if you love her. Wait, what’s your name again? I’m confused. This is all so much black confusion. Shouldn’t I be swimmingly noble? Don’t I know the cross-chest carry? Aren’t I a Kennedy? Aren’t I the brother of the hero of PT-109? Isn’t now the time? No. Now is not the time. Now is the time to save yourself. Doesn’t matter who you are, Senator, save yourself—and run. My brother once said (though he doesn’t remember): Don’t we sort of love what we kill? This I’ve learned on my own. Sometimes you just have to save yourself and then run like hell. There’ll always be time for nobility, honor, sorrow, remorse, yes, maybe even love—in the morning.