by Peter Orner
“You’ll be all right, too,” I said.
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“You will.”
“Don’t say it again, all right?”
I looked around the room. In the corner was a pile of tattered boxes of board games. A stack of old magazines. There was a computer inside what looked like a video arcade game, the screen behind thick glass, a keyboard dangling from a chain.
“I brought you a brownie,” I said.
We used to say we lived in the country of us. I’ve never been able to explain this to anyone, though everyone I have told has nodded like they understood. Nine years we lived there. I watched her eat a brownie.
“Aren’t I thin?”
“You’re too thin.”
“Want some brownie?”
“No, I brought it for you.”
“Take some.”
She handed me a piece of the brownie. Nine years. Our fingers met. A half hour later, the kind small man with an accent—Polish?—unlocked the door and let me out.
A couple of years before I was born, my mother took my four-year-old brother and ran away from my father, home to Massachusetts and her parents, where they holed up like fugitives. She said she wouldn’t go back to Chicago if she was dragged by a train. My brother had a field day with Grandpa Walt, staying up all night eating doughnuts and talking about whether Johnson would dump Humphrey from the ticket. A week later, my father flew east. He knelt on the sidewalk with white roses and sang her name. Neighbors watched the drama from behind their curtains. Phones rang up and down Robeson Street. Vivian, can you get more romantic with a capital R? But those days before he showed up, I think about them, the stillness of my mother’s mornings. Something peaceful about the possibility of my own nonexistence. My mother didn’t go see any of her friends. The farthest she ventured from her old bedroom was the backyard, where she sat on the huge boulder she used to sit on as a kid, her chin in her hand, and her father would call out the window of his study, Hey, would you look at the thinker perched on her rock? Except that he didn’t say anything, only watched her, she being twenty-six and married now.
FALL RIVER, 1967
My mother stands by the window, holding a duster, listening to Frank Zappa. Like a lot of people, she pretended to like the music more than she actually did, which is what Zappa himself counted on. He figured if people pretended long enough, they might actually start to listen. No one’s here but me, and I am asleep. She dusts a little, but there’s something about the song, the stopping and the starting, the half-talking, half-singing–Movin’ to Montana soon / Gonna be a Dental Floss tycoon–that makes her want to refuse in principle to do anything productive. Zappa’s pretty out there, her friend Judy had said when she gave her the record. It isn’t a place my mother is at all against going–out there. Now I am awake and shrieking. To buy a minute or two, she turns up the volume. My mother examines the duster. It is made of some sort of feathers and she wonders what dead bird was worth this clean apartment, or anybody’s.
CHICAGO, 1973
It may have been in The Wapshot Chronicle where someone–the grandmother?–leaves Middlemarch outside during a storm. All those heroically screwed-up lives–all those hopes, all those beautiful failures–bloated with rain. It made me think of my mother in her room. Sometimes she’d stay up all night, reading. Middlemarch was one of the books always on the table beside the bed. It was the guest room, but we called it her room. She no longer shared my father’s. We didn’t have many guests. The door’s locked. Sometimes at night my father comes and tries the knob.
HIGHLAND PARK, 1978
THE MOORS OF CHICAGO
We’d go out to the hill at night, Stu Barkus and me, and sometimes the moon was out and we could see each other’s lips move in the dark. Old conversations dry up like rain. I haven’t seen Barkus in years. I tried calling him after I heard his father died, but the number I had didn’t work.
Still, out there, there was an easiness, the rare kind of easiness you get with someone you’ve known so long there’s no need to prove anything. Sometimes we’d smoke a little, talk some more, but now that I’m thinking of the hill, mostly what I remember is us not talking. And I remember remembering. My parents used to take my brother and me up to the hill. My mother would lie on her back and stare at the sky. My father would talk. My mother would look at the sky and sometimes answer him, sometimes not. I’d run around in circles in the grass. From the very top you could see the lake. My mother called the hill the moors of Chicago. It wasn’t until I read but didn’t finish Wuthering Heights in college that I understood what she was talking about, but even then I think I realized that there was something unhappy about the place. Maybe not the place itself exactly, but our place in it. It was too vast, too open, and too full of other people’s laughter. Maybe this is why my parents brought us out there. Maybe they thought something would rub off on us. One time my father brought a kite he’d built from a kit. It was made of thin wooden sticks and paper so fine you could blow your nose with it. He spent an hour in the basement that morning gluing the kite together. He got it off the ground, but the wind ripped the spindle—is it called a spindle?—out of my hand, and the kite fluttered and took a nosedive into the grass. I cheered. Then I went over and jumped on it, crushed it to pieces.
Out there with Stu Barkus under the moon, I remembered this and told him about it. He listened. Barkus didn’t tell his own stories. He didn’t tell me, for instance, as I might have done, about a time he betrayed his own father’s small attempt at something approximating love. If he said anything at all, I don’t remember what it was. He may only have nodded his head in the dark.
My father tried, my mother tried. They knew they’d end sooner or later. In the meantime, we had to live. So they took us out to the moors, a mythical place that we all thought existed. Other people’s laughter on the wind. My mother on the grass staring at the sky, my father talking, my brother reading. I was the youngest, wandering in circles.
BELIEF, 1999
An old Communist who believed in it once and for all time, but who also, almost from the very beginning, nursed a healthy animosity for the liars who carried it out and fouled it up—so he was never considered by anyone who mattered to be a very good Communist—walks the streets of Nusle in northwest Prague with hunched shoulders. Feet no good anymore, and so he shuffles, wanders, watches the changes, watches the young men and their cars, watches the apartment balconies crumble. What good was believing? And yet the alternative was not having faith in his fellow men, and isn’t this another way of dying? Now he shuffles and watches, not hating any of it, any of them, but at the same time lording over them like the god he always swore he never wanted to be, and yet, if there’s been any change at all in him after thirty-two years of heavy labor at Poldi Kladno, it is this: that he’s so old now he is like a god, not participating, only watching, not giving any opinions, not scoffing, not pointing his glass and spouting off in the pub about the way things were then—none of that. Only existing, whatever this means, if it can mean anything for a man who no longer has the strength to work. And even the love he once had for Marketa has boiled down and hardened, so that it’s not even a memory anymore. More like one of the rocks she used to line up on the windowsill in the kitchen. He can pick it up and hold it, but it doesn’t jolt him. Marketa used to tell him not to be so serious, that he was always so serious, watching himself as though from a camera on the wall. You a movie star, Bohumil?
Irv Pincus used to steal lamps from Kaplan’s Furniture and turn around and sell them in the alley at a deep discount. As a salesman inside the store, the man never lifted a pinkie, but in the alley Irv could really move the merchandise. The store’s gone. In ’66 the state of Massachusetts built I-195 smack through downtown. Kaplan’s gone. City Hall gone. Dug a hole right through Main Street. Eminent domain, the sovereign power to take property for necessary public good. What good the new highway ever did for this city other than allow the rest of the
world to drive right by and ignore it, Walt never knew. But maybe this was the point. Don’t slow down, people, otherwise you might notice what’s been lost. When they tore his store down, Walt stood on the sidewalk and wept into his sleeve. Not the store itself he mourned but the hours he spent at his office window watching, among other things, Irv Pincus fleece him in broad daylight. Try explaining this to my wife. It’s the pictures in my head, Sarah, it’s the pictures in my head they’re wrecking. How am I supposed to hold it all without the brick and mortar around to remind me? Walt Kaplan died a decade later at fifty-nine years old. But can’t you see Irv Pincus out there behind the store, auctioning off $150 Hudson Bay lamps to the highest bidder? Shirtsleeves, his flabby arms swinging: Do I hear a hundred? Ninety? Eighty-five? Fifty? Anybody? Forty and it’s a deal. The man outlived Walt Kaplan by more years than anybody in the family bothered to count. Irv relocated to Miami Beach and called it America, sand between his toes, bless his pilfering soul.
FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS, 1957
SHHHHHH, ARTHUR’S STUDYING
ROMAN UPHEAVAL TOPIC OF A BOOK BY DR. KAPLAN
Can Cataline be cleared? The reputation of the Roman conspirator assigned to infamy in the polemics of Cicero has been reclaimed…
—FALL RIVER HERALD NEWS, SEPTEMBER 25, 1968
Walt’s brother Arthur was a quiet boy who grew into an accomplished man. When they were boys, it was always Shhhhhh, Arthur’s studying. There’s got to be at least one yeshiva bocher in every family and a yeshiva bocher’s got to have quiet. Go play outside, Walt, your brother’s studying. And so Walt went to work in their father’s furniture store and Arthur went to college, first to Brown and then to Columbia for his Ph.D. in classics. Arthur’s face was pale. He always looked as though he’d been dusted with flour. This added to his gravitas, and Walt, like the rest of the family, was proud that Arthur looked the part of a scholar ghost.
Arthur’s first and only book appeared in 1968. For a man who lived such a quiet life (he’d married a wan, squirrelly-looking girl and they lived in Brooklyn without children), the book turned out to be a bit scandalous. The title was innocuous enough: Cataline and His Role in the Roman Revolution. Yet the book was a surprisingly spirited, and graphic, defense of Cataline, a man who apparently made a lot of trouble two thousand years ago. Here he was now, wreaking havoc once again via the pen of meek little Arthur Kaplan, a man who came out of the womb speaking Latin. They called him a villainous fiend, murderer, corrupter of youth and donkeys, venial proprietor, traitor, drunken debauchee, temple robber… Plutarch himself topped it off with the accusation that Cataline deflowered his own daughter.
And all this in the prologue.
What? the family gasped. What? Don’t get us wrong. An author is an author is an author, and our Arthur is an author. His name’s right there on the cover. But incest? Donkeys? Maybe he should have been out in the street playing stickball with Walt.
“Maybe nobody will read it.”
“Ah yes. Of course, that’s the ticket. Nobody will read it!”
“But we’ll put it on the shelf.”
“Yes, absolutely. We’ll put it on the shelf.”
Upon Arthur’s triumphant return to Fall River, he gave a short speech at his alma mater, BMC Durfee High School, noting that the destruction of Cataline’s reputation was the result of the same sort of mudslinging that characterizes the politics of today. “And if you think the Romans were violent? Maybe we ought to look at ourselves in this year, 1968. It is often not the great man who is ultimately heard but his detractors. Detractors always shout louder and use more colorful language. Elections bring out the poet in politicians, don’t they? Take, for instance, the consular elections of sixty-four B.C., when Cicero called Piso (father of Caesar’s last wife, Calpurnia), among other things, brute, plague, butcher, linkboy of Cataline, lump of carrion, drunken fool, inhuman lunatic, feces, epicurean pig, assassin, temple robber, plunderer of Macedonia, infuriated pirate egged on by desire for booty and rapine… And yet it must be said that compared to Piso, Cataline was a red pepper.”
This was followed by an expectant pause. Arthur leaned over the podium, gaped at his audience, and waited.
Someone whispered loudly—it may have been Aunt Haddy—Does he have to keep making those awful lists?
Arthur said it again: “Compared to Piso, Cataline was a red pepper!”
Arthur’s pasty face, his eyes imploring. Sarah nudged Walt: What’s he talking about?
Shhhhhhhhhh.
Walt dug his mouth in his wife’s ear. Claude Pepper, the pinko senator. He’s making a joke. And so it was Walt who finally, out of mercy, rescued his brother by laughing. Everybody else followed his lead. Ah, Red Pepper! Cataline was a Red Pepper! Ha, ha.
Ha.
Are you finished with this speech, Arthur?
One night, about a month or so later, it was Walt who after dinner took the book off the shelf in the living room where Sarah had safely stored it for posterity. He carried it upstairs to his study in the flat of his hand like a waiter carrying a tray. Then he locked the door and went to Rome. Night was thinning into morning by the time Cataline uttered the last of his famous last words: But if fortune frowns on your bravery, take care not to die unavenged. Do not be captured and slaughtered like cattle, but, fighting like heroes, leave the enemy a bloody and tearful victory.
Walt hears trumpets. If fortune frowns! Viva Cataline! Viva the traitor!
Furthermore, as my brother so cogently argues, no self-respecting republic should be without a little healthy rebellion. It keeps everybody honest, and with a blowhard like Cicero around, somebody had to draw a line across the Forum with his sword. Walt slides off his chair and onto the carpet. He stares at the ceiling. His study has always been a box that envelops him, protects him. There are days he mourns this room, wonders how it will go on without him when he’s gone. Right now, the distance between himself on the floor and the ceiling is intolerable.
I’m lying in a grave on my own carpet. To think there are people who believe that, when it’s all over, the angels sing and we float up higher and higher. They don’t doubt. They believe. Before I put on my other sock, I’ve doubted the entire day. And my brother writes: “The great revolutionist was found far in advance of his slain foemen, still breathing lightly, and showing on Cataline’s face the indomitable spirit that had animated him when alive.”
The Roman Army carried his severed head back to the Eternal City in a basket.
Once, outside this very room, a jay rammed into the window. Then he backed up and flew into it again. Again. Again. Again, until he finally dropped into the dirt. They say only man is valiant enough to die for lost causes.
In the blue-gray light, Walt Kaplan thinks, My people sleep. My own brother, a man who has faith enough—believes enough—to devote his life to raising an ancient debaucher from the dead, sleeps in leafy Brooklyn beside his squirrelly wife. My Sarah and my daughter sleep across the hall. In sleep, they breathe their finite breaths. The dawn sun claws upward. I sink into carpet. I dream of home when I’m home, of love when I love. How can I shout farewell from the mountaintop if I never leave the house? How can I rise to protect my people if I don’t even own a sword?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Ellen Levine for steadfast faith and invaluable support.
Thanks also: to Dean Paul Sherwin and Maxine Chernoff at San Francisco State, to Betsy Uhrig for her generous and infinite patience, to Lynn Warshow for her careful eye over the course of four books, to Carolyn O’Keefe for her tireless advocacy, as well as to Eric Orner, Ronald Orner, David Krause, Nick Regiacorte, Audrey Petty (who dreams about Harold Washington also), Alex Gordon, Rob Preskill, Melissa Kirsch, Tom Barbash, Jason Roberts, Junse Kim, and Ed Schwartzchild.
And finally and foremost: to Katie and Phoebe.
I also wish to express my gratitude to the editors of the following publications, where stories in this collection first appeared: “Foley’s Pond” and “T
he Vac-Haul” in the Paris Review; “At the Kitchen Table” and “Dyke Bridge” in Granta; “Eisendrath” (as “No Light”), “Paddy Bauler in a Quiet Moment,” “The Mayor’s Dream,” and “Harold Washington Walks at Midnight” in A Public Space; “Geraldo, 1986” and “Shhhhhh, Arthur’s Studying” in Conjunctions; “Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge” in the Harvard Review; “Pampkin’s Lament” in McSweeney’s; “Occidental Hotel” and “The Divorce” in Narrative; “Herb and Rosalie Swanson at the Cocoanut Grove” and “Spokane” in Bomb; “February 26, 1995” in Guernica; “Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago, 1875” in Ploughshares; “Reverend Hrncirik Receives an Airmail Package” in the Southern Review; “Horace and Josephine” in Ninth Letter; “Denny Coughlin: in Memory” in Grantland; “The Moors of Chicago” in Once; “Waldheim” in New American Writing; “Renters” in World Literature Today; “Plaza Revolución, Mexico City, 6 a.m.” in Witness; and “Longfellow” and “1979” in Zyzz yva.
Thanks as well to the editors of The Black Warrior Review, 14 Hills, Cadillac Cicatrix, the Cincinnati Review, the Cellar Door, Cutbank, Lost, the Mississippi Review, Northeastern Magazine, Northeastern Law Magazine, and Third Coast.
“Nathan Leopold Writes…” first appeared in Chicago Noir (Akashic Books, New York); “Belief, 1999” appeared in The Return of Král Majáles (Litteraria Pragensia Books / Charles University, Czech Republic).
“On the 14” appeared as “On the 88” in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Pampkin’s Lament” was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXII.
