Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

  “I’m afraid I missed Caribou Summer. You were closer to the sad one?”

  “The dead one, you mean. I love them all, my whole ridiculous family. But it’s been a long time—childhood, really—since I was close to any of them. What about you, Orrin. Your parents.”

  “Well of course I am a parent, son and a daughter, so there’s that. My own were both schoolteachers, in upstate New York. Good quiet gentle people. Both have been dead some time now, you know.”

  Orrin frequently employed the verbal bridge ‘you know’ and though he was vaguely aware of the tendency (rather attached to it, in fact) he did not always notice. Here, because of context, he did and so smilingly appended: “I guess you don’t know, do you. But this is really delicious, Eli, a very enjoyable meal.”

  Paperman agreed, and taking the shift to indicate a liking for some silence, or for less intimate talk, he passed a few minutes eating fish and salad. Orrin also ate, hauling large shrimps and chunks of flavored fish up out of the gumbo, and mused about his way with conversation, the role he generally took. He was an interrogator and a listener—as though life was for others to live and then report back to him on what it had been like. There was a chicken/ egg aspect to his choice of profession: a shrink because he was that way, or that way because he was a shrink? But he had not been that way with Gail, or with the children, had he?

  “I’m sorry if I made you think of your folks unhappily,” said Paperman, who was above all, it seemed, a direct person.

  “Not a bit, Paperman. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about my children. One of whom is very nearly your age. But I was thinking of a time he and I were riding in a car on a sunny Saturday morning, just the two of us, and it was very cold, and some bigtime gangster had just been shot to death in a barber’s chair in New York. Clyde asked me dozens of questions about it—he was clearly fascinated—and I told him about bootleggers, and Al Capone, and Legs Diamond. The Mob, you know. And we got onto criminals: why some people are criminals and some aren’t. I don’t know what made me think of it, to tell you the truth.”

  He could have known, for he had been delving back in time, trying to reconstruct the way he had behaved with them at different ages. How had he seemed to them? False, withdrawn, cold? Surely not in the moments he was able to reclaim—that Saturday with Clyde in the blue DeSoto, or the night they came home tipsy and caught Elspeth, then nine, squatting in the liquor closet. Never the defensive sort, El complained she had tried every bottle and found nothing she liked to drink.

  Those times, that night, he had been fine. Gentle, like his own father, charmed by them really, and always happy to be the fount of information. Fatherly no doubt, though perhaps (like his own father, again) ever so slightly impersonal.

  Backtracking through the Public Gardens, Orrin and Eli Paperman stepped down onto the frozen lagoon and slid across to the steep little island where ducks nested in warm weather. The Christmas storm had cracked a big alder branch right near the trunk and it dangled in the thrall of wet black ice. Beyond it, up through the web of smaller branches, a white moon seemed very tame and close by.

  Something in this image reminded him of childhood—his own? Clyde and El’s?—of some distant happy emotion that was no less pleasant for remaining obscure.

  II

  The Germ of Corruption

  “Funny position, wasn’t it? The boredom came later, when we lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don’t know. One gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.”

  —CONRAD

  7

  Business was bad, but Orrin felt comfortable with it. You could hardly take a bill before the Congress, on behalf of the psychotherapist’s lobby, saying there is insufficient neurosis and let’s start doing more to induce it. For Orrin’s money, life itself was crazier than ever—the trouble was that most people were perfectly well-adjusted to it.

  Even at this low ebb, Orrin had thirteen clients on the books. You could say this was unlucky, but he said it was better than twelve. Besides, it wasn’t a case of the more the merrier. If he went to twenty, if business picked up to that extent, he would be overwhelmed—especially if two or three were the kind that Beekman called “full-time help,” the ones who came five days a week. It seemed to Orrin the days were full enough, when you added to work the inevitable errands, the transit time and the squandered time, small pleasures like eating, plus all the incidental erosions of a society where several layers of government and a hundred outfits in 1-800-Land had your profile in their accursed computers.

  How anyone found the time for squash, or swimming, or all this weight training that went on was a mystery to Orrin. Perhaps he had become low energy without noticing it, from vitamin deficiency or emotional disorder. Or perhaps it was the comparison with Eli that made it seem so. Eli was, of course, a much younger man, but he was also a true phenom, who expended the energy of three men each day and never showed a trace of fatigue.

  Paperman careened through the streets before breakfast (he called it “walking”) when the city was just stirring. In still cold January air, dull washy sun on the dewblacked macadam, he moved among stray cats, bread trucks, and a faction Orrin had yet to pin down, which Eli called “The Donut Crowd.” Then it was a counter breakfast with both papers before he bolted to the courthouse for a full morning.

  Eli shared office space in Cambridge, where he worked afternoons and early evenings, yet he managed to squeeze in an hour of basketball every day at the Y.M.C.A., frequent movies (virtual private screenings in the daytime, at discount prices) and sundry assignations for coffee, beer, luncheon, and dinner, with friends both male and female. It was an awesome humbling program; Orrin was just as glad to have a little leisure.

  For he had come into a sort of intellectual renaissance. He found himself making notes and beginnings on a variety of topics, turning ideas into theories, theories into potential papers. He had not written anything in ten years—had in fact defaulted on a book contract after blowing the advance on a junket to Berlin—but was now considering a full-length treatment (or more realistically in light of his current energy level, a paper) on the psychological fallout from altered family structures.

  Orrin Summers the intellectual had pretty much foresworn News and Weather. Moreover, in the weeks since Eli’s arrival, he had placed but a single phone call from Filbert Street. He had been thinking of Ted, and specifically of how he had badgered Ted in those desperate moments after Gail left. That was all right in a way, to call a friend in time of need, so long as he also called in milder times, to say hello or offer a less refusable sip of whiskey.

  So he phoned on a Sunday afternoon of sunlit snowflurries, with the vague idea they might join up later for a plate of spaghetti in the North End, to visit at leisure by red winelight. But Ted was more than usually frantic.

  “Orrin, for God’s sake. It’s Super Sunday.”

  “Of course it is. I’ll be right over.”

  “No! Stay!”

  “I’m not a dog, Theo.”

  “Sorry, please excuse. It’s just the excitement.”

  “So shall I join you?”

  “Sure, why not? Come ahead if you like.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass. I appreciate the invite, though. I really do, Theo.”

  “Testing me!”

  “No, not at all. I just called to say hello. And to thank you for all your patience and kindness these past—”

  “Testing me,” repeated Ted, but hollowly. He was gone. Orrin could picture his attorney, absently clutching the receiver, his gaze locked on the screenful of behemoths.

  “Well, at least you passed the test,” Orrin consoled him.

  “Fuck you, Orrin, it’s third and seven,” said Ted, and Orrin took his hanging up to signify a “no�
� to the unmentioned dinner scheme. In a way it was good to be hung up on again; it reminded Orrin of how far he had come.

  That afternoon he took a note from Paperman (who was out of town for the weekend) and went to a matinée. And because everyone else was doing the Super Bowl Shuffle, he had the theatre to himself for a film called Colonel Redl, a lovely sunless disjointed boring portrait of political man in the web of classbound Europe before the first World War. An Austrian named Brandauer (Marlon Brandauer?) played the title role with some genius and still Orrin kept losing focus. Twice he snapped awake in the small overheated screening room.

  By the end he was experiencing a terrible but very specific thirst—for Coca-Cola with ice cubes—and drained a tall one, absurdly delicious, at the concessionaire before stepping out to the further refreshment of an ear-biting wind. The foot journey home was nevertheless welcome. After sitting so long staring at a sheet of light, the blurred Whistlerian half-dark of the dimming Boston skyline (the Pru looming above the Paine) seemed a vast yet highly personal work of art.

  Back home, feeling at peace and almost complacent, Orrin was about to launch a Pizza-For-One into the toaster oven when Eli stormed in and ridiculed the notion.

  “Frozen pizza for one? Why don’t we get a real pizza, for two? It’ll taste better, boss. Some fresh peppers, onions, a little sausage if you like?”

  “Why not just pop in two Pizza-For-Ones. It’s so easy.”

  “Don’t you touch that toaster oven. Fetch your pipe and slippers, and I’ll be back in twenty minutes with the real thing.”

  “Pepperoni, then.”

  “Done. All you have to do is not unplug the fridge by accident, so the Bud stays cold.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Eli. Count on me.”

  And Eli was off again, after a working weekend plus six hours of travel on Sunday, spilling out the door like a kid shedding the confines of the schoolhouse for the first big storm of winter.

  Paperman was not a reformer, not really, and he was not always around. Far from it. He was gone for days at a time, pursuing justice for Puerto Rican housemaids in Connecticut, nuclear energy workers in Oklahoma, unwed fathers in Washington State. It seemed he left no legal stone unturned.

  Still it was indisputable that Orrin Summers was a reformed man, and that the change was tied to the advent of Paperman. Orrin imbibed no more alcohol now than the supplicants at an Episcopalian service. One small drink at the hour of transition—the stereotypical cocktail reinstated—and that was it. Orrin drank as his friend Pigford drank, to gratify a thirst, and these days he was not so thirsty. When he was, in the depleted oxygen of a badly subdivided movie room, the thirst had been for soda.

  He had cut back his News to Jack-and-Liz at six. They were at their best then anyway; at eleven they often looked sleepy, soft and furry at the edges. And as to Weather, Orrin had gone existential, taking his weather as it came. He might register a personal impression at the window, or even stand a moment on the little balcony if serious questions of apparel hung in the balance, but no more did he consult The Little Lost Boys.

  All this reform made room for work, and work had become his richest vein. His clients were charged with new interest, they came alive for him again, and he continued to elaborate his dialectical outcroppings every night. It had been a long time since Orrin believed the world might be enlightened en masse, or that he might be the man for the job. He did not go that far now, but could again acknowledge the value of rendering the best thought in all fields, including his own.

  Brisk walks, better food, and yes, less of the wet stuff did restore his energy. That was a point. It might not kill him, but it did leave him unshakably sluggish on too many mornings. Now he slept well and woke clear-eyed, ready for the light. If Gail could see him now, she might retract everything she had said and done.

  Meanwhile he had his finest day at the office in years, losing a client for the best of reasons (“cured”) and gaining two new ones from the recommendations of former clients, always a welcome and valid tribute. Orrin felt competent, and his success had cost him nothing. This was an aspect of psychotherapy that Eli had questioned: especially in the carriage trade, did not an analyst have more vested in the illness than in the cure? The Hippocratic Oath one thing, the wolf at the door another?

  Opening two files, closing one, Orrin was outside the range of any conflict of interest, though the truth was he would miss seeing Lynn Warburton. He had liked her from the start. It had taken eighteen months to smooth her way back to self-esteem and it had brought Orrin at one point, a low water day in late November, within a camel’s hair of his first in-office indiscretion.

  Sarah had left early that day, and all the constellations were in place for a quickie on the couch or a segue to one of Bamford’s famous Phase One Dinners. (Phase One: dinner. Phase Two: the bed.) It was not the impropriety which had stopped him either, for he had already finished calculating the odds against humiliation just like a teenager in a car.

  But he had envisioned an entire night with her, in the reality dimension—indeed on his home court at Filbert—and there was no place for Warburton there, in that downcast chaos, in sheets last laundered around Labor Day. That had brought him back to the mark. That plus the recognition that Warburton’s self-esteem, on the rise, had crossed orbits with his own, still descending.

  “I helped her,” he bragged to Eli that evening, the night of Warburton’s graduation. “I helped a fellow human! Don’t you agree that’s quite wonderful at my age?”

  “The woman was seriously depressed?”

  “Oh yes. Suicidal for months.” Warburton aglow, inner light dancing in her blue eyes, made it hard to summon back Warburton as waxwork, eyes drained of all color, like cellophane. “She had everything but the nerve to do it.”

  “But isn’t that always true? Isn’t cowardice all that keeps anyone alive, in one way or another?”

  “Is it?”

  “It keeps us all behind the lines, away from the danger. Fear is everyone’s best protection—and the best weapon of the reactionary party.”

  “I wasn’t invited to that one, Eli. But really, how dangerous is political action in this country? Physically dangerous, I mean. Not very.”

  “Oh you take your life in your hands any time you cross the power, believe it. A hell of a lot of black people have been murdered. Native-Americans too, and I don’t mean back in the days of Daniel Boone only. Then you have your Karen Silkwoods …”

  “Do you fear for your own life, then?”

  “No, but only because I’m a coward. I wear the uniform and I play by the rules.”

  “But you probably decided playing by the rules would be more effective.”

  “Yes I did. But it’s still frustrating to do it. Don’t you think Martin Luther King would have felt just terrific if he could somehow—just once—have nailed J. Edgar Hoover with one huge left hook?”

  “I’m getting confused here between cowardice and restraint.”

  “Yeah. Well anyway, I’m glad for your client, Orrin. And for you.”

  “I was rather attracted to her, actually. Which is very rare for me. I’m really quite a one-woman man.”

  “It’s the next best thing to no woman at all.”

  “Come on. You? You must have them coming at you from all angles.”

  “Well I’m single and pushing forty, so I have had a few girlfriends—”

  “I thought there might have been an accumulation.”

  “—but no, Orrin, I’m no Don Juan. To tell you the truth, I’ve always thought—and this is serious, Orrin, I’m being honest—that you have to choose between love and life.”

  “That’s hardly the most romantic of testimonials, Eli.”

  “With real love, and marriage and family, your best energies have to go into all those petty cares. And you find it impossible to work for anything larger than your own little life provides you. I’ve seen it happen so many times, to the loveliest people.”

 
; “But not to you, yet.”

  “Damn it, Orrin, I can’t stay straight with you. I keep remembering that you’re a shrink and then I start to feel I’m revealing some terribly obvious flaw in my story. In my character.”

  “Let’s chuck it then. I don’t want to worry you. And please don’t ever think I’m judgmental, or that I’m looking to break anyone down into psychological categories. I’m really not like that.”

  “Fair enough. I got uptight. And probably that means I was revealing my flaws. But it needn’t be blamed on you.”

  “Thank you, Paperman, that’s damned generous of you.”

  “So what were we talking about before all that stuff came spilling out?”

  “Suicide, I think.”

  “No wonder we changed the subject, in that case. But no, it wasn’t really that, it was your client—the one you have a crush on …”

  “It looks like I am the one who revealed too much! I’m afraid we will have to change the subject again.”

  8

  The first week of February there was a severe ice-storm and the power was out on Beacon Hill all evening. In the whipping ice of twilight, Orrin had ventured from the flat for no better reason than that he found it unpleasant sitting indoors as the darkness thickened and spread. A brief hit of the old sinking feeling. He would try for candles at the Seven-Eleven store, and maybe grab a tin of popcorn too, to “improve the occasion” as his parents had always done with blackouts at the Grand Avenue house in Schenectady.

  That house—a farmhouse originally, lopped off a generation earlier from the land which had once been sown around it and standing now barnless and alone on an acre with two Macintosh apple-trees and a weed-smothered tin-rust shed—was Orrin’s first childhood home and he had loved his young life there. During the Depression there were friends who felt the pinch. Albert Hageman’s family, and then Billy Dornhoeffer’s, had picked up and moved away, though their foreclosed homes stood empty and useless for years after, until the cardboard bank signs became faded, and delaminated at the curling edges. Orrin’s parents both kept working, which made them “rich.” When many families were desperate for a single paycheck, they had two, and although teachers did make low salaries it was also an inexpensive life. Their one modest luxury, a Model A Ford now six years old, was all paid up and still running.