Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

“A concussion, you mean.”

  “Discussion. And on a fairly high plane at that. I was bitter about the Red Sox, you know, about the way they get a clean slate every spring. They have no past, Clydie, they hibernate and wake up in first place.”

  “You don’t believe that. The Red Sox? Don’t you know they carry the burden of history with them on every turn around the bases?”

  “That’s what the fat one kept saying! The same words, burden of history. Can you believe it?”

  This last he addressed to Phyllis, who could only shrug and say, “Well, it hardly matters.”

  “It does matter, though. Do either of you want this apple juice, by the way? Phyll?”

  “No thank you, Orrin.”

  “No, Dad, but let’s not lose the thrust of this. The Red Sox have a team character, and character is fate for them too. It’s true of every sports franchise with a past.”

  “Phyll, these are very lovely. Shall I ring the nurse for some kind of vase?”

  “Why don’t I take care of it, Orrin. You two can talk.”

  Phyllis was always stealing off to let them “talk”, as though they had secrets from her, or would turn to some manly tone of address that must naturally exclude her. Was this a form of polite respect, or was it merely a form of escape for her?

  “Seriously, Clyde, I want out of here. I have so much to do at home.”

  “They definitely won’t let you go yet. No point tussling with City Hall.”

  Clyde was determined to pin his father here for at least a few days, to take better stock of the problem. The lawyer Eli Paperman thought it went beyond drink—that something had really snapped in Orrin—and had urged Clyde to disregard any charming disclaimers. Orrin meanwhile felt oddly cleansed, and had begun to worry about neglected work, about Sinclair-Fugard, and the gifted lad Lowry, and the notes on self-knowledge …

  “There is simply no way I can fail to be in the office first thing Monday, son. That’s for starters.”

  “Okay, that might be possible. But let’s do be realistic, Dad. Be professional with yourself. You’ve been under a mighty strain, you’ve been unhappy—”

  “Not at all. How measured? And by whom?”

  “—and doing too much drinking—”

  “Now how can you sit out in Lexington and know a thing like, that, for goodness sake? I am a realist, Clyde, and I know you mean very well. But tracking the old reality is sometimes not so easy.”

  “Forget the old reality—it’s the weekend. And it’s pleasant enough here. You can catch up on your reading.”

  “I just want you to understand that I am all right. I appreciate your taking such trouble over me, I’m touched by it really, but I’m sure you have better things to worry about.”

  “Not a one, in fact.”

  “Now tell me: is your mother the source on my alleged drinking? Because I know she took a wrong impression one night—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Clyde shrugged, replicating his bride’s tone of voice precisely. He was not about to name his source.

  “You know, when your mother was still in the house—and you may say or she may say she wasn’t really, but really she was, you know, physically there—and you and I would get together occasionally for lunch? Back then, it was just last year really, it seemed to me that Elspeth was the aberration, and by her own choice, you know. We were still there, as a family.”

  Clyde was casting about for a soothing response to this sudden spillage when the nurse came in with a black blood-pressure cuff and merrily bound up Orrin’s arm. He ignored this, speaking and gesturing with both arms despite the loose band flapping.

  “And then there was this slight shift and suddenly it seemed clear that I was now the aberration—though I had done nothing differently, nothing at all. But I was the aberration and I couldn’t get back because now there was no family anymore. But so suddenly, so mysteriously, you know.”

  “Please be still for just a moment, Mr. Summers.”

  “It’s very sad to me, Clyde. Very sad.”

  “I understand, Dad. We want to do what we can to help. To—” Clyde paused and with surprising force in his eyes caused the nurse to cease, desist, and leave the room. “—to remind you that we consider you an important part of our family too. The boys are so fond of you, and I’m sure in time you and Mom will be on better terms too.”

  “Does she plan to visit? Does she know about my near-fatal concussing?”

  Clyde hesitated. There were strategies to consider. His father might lie back and act the proper invalid if he had reason to expect a visit from his mother. But there was the old reality to ponder, those late returns from the outlying precincts. For Clyde knew there would be no visit forthcoming.

  “I hope you don’t mind her knowing. I did tell her how the situation stood, and she asked to be kept up to date …”

  “Do you suppose she would come if you reported I was on my deathbed? That I was weighing out the cadences of my final words?”

  “She might, Dad. But then if you failed to kick off, she would never take the bait a second time.”

  “Right you are. Better not to chance it,” said Orrin, smiling back at his son, as Phyllis returned with a plastic water-pitcher, hospital green, for the flowers.

  Clyde must have moved in to the hospital too, for he kept popping up every few hours. Ted Neff ducked in after lunch (somehow finding the time to “crosscheck this rumor they had slowed your stride”) and he was extremely kind. Ted was a man, Orrin felt in watching him, who might have been happier as a failure. Success had not spoiled him, but it had somehow disoriented him, shaken up his ditty bag and left him with a jumble of loose emotional change in lieu of true feeling. But then maybe all lives were sad, or seemed sad, once they began winding down.…

  This Orrin was not quite ready to believe. His afternoon was both busy and slow, sociable and yet agreeably private—like the sick days he would take in grade school, alone with his mother in the Grand Avenue house. She would take those days off too, and she would set him up with puzzles and comic-books and lemon custard, and take his fever down with orange-flavored aspergum. Sleep was there at the welcome moments when it simply took him.

  By dinnertime (his meal catered in by Phyll against the hospital fare, which even in the Emerson was pretty unpalatable) Orrin was convinced he must really have been ailing, since he unquestionably felt a great deal better. In the lounge room after dinner, it was downright festive, as Theo found the time to return and this time brought along a few faces from The Club.

  They worked through the jokes about mortality, and the Red Sox of course, and then took up the unfortunate extent to which madness was taking root among the poor, so that clinics and halfway houses were overflowing, the streets were teeming with borderliners, while along Carriage Row a mild recession had set in. “Human frailty just ain’t what it used to be,” lamented Barry Grimm, dismissing from the category human anyone earning less than sixty-five thousand per annum.

  By the time the pipe smoke had risen and all the trivial banter trailed away with it, Orrin was pleasantly exhausted, and eager for a perfect sleep. Had he fallen off straightaway, he was good for the duration, till the powers-that-be came in to draw his drapes and unveil the bright blooming banks of the Charles. Once or twice he narrowly missed: the full flavor of sleep was right there on his palate, only to vaporize in a mistwist of the neck or a voice adrift on the ward. After a time though, the twists and discomforts multiplied and the unfamiliar sounds grew more rampant and sonorous by the minute. As sleep became less possible (and Orrin concomitantly more deeply exhausted) he began to contemplate escape.

  At three a.m. a nurse actually flickered on the overhead fluorescent to see if he was finally sleeping and there was no longer any question: a hospital was the last place on earth where a person could expect to get any rest. He endured another half-hour of it (arhythmic hum of traffic on Storrow, arriving sirens, scuffle and clatter in the overbright corridor) then rang for the nurs
e to let her know he would be checking out.

  “I’m sure if you are feeling up to it, Doctor will let you go home tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is out of the question. Besides which it is tomorrow. Has been for hours, unfortunately.”

  “No one can leave the hospital before Doctor signs a release, sir—you can understand that.”

  “Well then, get me Doctor. Please. I’ll see the night man.”

  “I would have to wake him up to do that. And this is not really something I can’t help you with myself.”

  “Fine. Help me with it, then. I’ll put on my pants and you put on my shirt.”

  “You can’t leave, sir.”

  “Then I insist on seeing Doctor. Why shouldn’t you wake him up, he is being paid to take care of business all night. I happen to know he is being paid by the hour and paid plenty, and I for one would like to see him earn it. What’s he done so far this hour?”

  Would she return empty-handed with a lame excuse, or with some young fool sleepily in tow? Orrin was dressed and brushing his teeth when there appeared at his elbow a fellow younger than Clyde, blonde and bespectacled, sleepsoaked yet stethoscoped: Doctor.

  “I understand you are having some difficulty sleeping.”

  “Unlike yourself, my good man! But seriously, Doctor, I am. And luckily for us, I’m well enough and close enough by to stroll home and sleep the sleep of the just in my own soft bed.”

  “That’s fine, sir, and I hope you understand we will need to decide it in the morning. For now, it’s best you get some rest.”

  “My whole point. Not getting any. Therefore not best!” The sleeping prince had somehow failed to grasp the issue.

  “Please be calm, sir. We’re certainly not going to discuss anything at all with you acting up.”

  “Is that what I’m doing? Do you really think it so crazy that a man in perfect health wishes to leave the hospital?”

  “No, I don’t. I didn’t say the word crazy.”

  “I said the word crazy. You said the word acting up, but it was two words, so I condensed. The point is I feel fine—or I would if I were asleep.”

  “How do you know?” said Doctor, stopping Orrin cold. The young fool was entering into the spirit of things!

  “Excellent point, Doctor. Allow me a rephrase: were I asleep, I would not care whether or not I felt fine.”

  “Maybe not. I’m not at all familiar with your case. As I say, it’s a matter for the a.m.”

  Thus concluded Doctor’s brief foray into metaphysics; he was headed back to bed. So Orrin could march (out the door, down the vile corridor, and out under the May stars) or he could capitulate. What held him, really, was Kafka. Orrin knew as well as anyone that a medical bureaucracy could swallow the key. And any words he spoke could be used to bolster their case, for such statements at such times were as minutely flexible as pipe-cleaners. He could see the Kafka plot already unfolding, what with Nurse loading one up on the sideboard, a hypo to stun a hippo, “a little something to help you rest.…”

  Orrin declined the shot and swore compliance. He thanked Nurse for her valuable time. But it went beyond Kafka: he was determined to prove his sanity. And his reward for such good intentions, (surprisingly) was sleep, though not for very long. Apparently they did not prescribe too much rest here, and certainly none past 5:45 when the ward was nudged back to life by the first flock of chirruping nurses. Astounding to think they would jar a man, presumed ill, from a shallow two-hour snooze to inquire did he wish prunes with his breakfast!

  “I don’t even want breakfast with my prunes!” he stated with some exasperation, then clamped both pillows to his throbbing skull. Somehow, in the midst of ward life, he managed to drift back and latch onto a pale washy dream, shot through a summer evening lens, in which Eli came grinning to the portal with flowers and said, “Top o’ the mornin’ to you, O’Summers.”

  Clyde appeared there in fact—no Phyllis and no flowers, but he did come bearing potable coffee, croissants, and the Sunday papers. Almost at once, with the first long swallow of coffee, Orrin came sidearm with a question he had not premeditated:

  “Did I ever strike you? As a child?”

  “I don’t think so, Dad. Why in the world do you ask?”

  “I must have spanked you.”

  “Not really. Nothing that hurt enough to make a memory, at least. Nothing worse, certainly, than the thump I gave Corey last night.”

  “What about your sister?”

  Clyde did not know that his father had struck Eli Paperman, and Orrin did not know that Paperman had spoken with Clyde: they were both fencing in the blue here.

  “I really don’t think so, Dad. You seem to have this idea that Elspeth hates you but she doesn’t, at all. There is no explanation, nothing to be explained about her. She is just out there on The Precipice, as I may have already mentioned?”

  “Your mother isn’t on The Precipice. Why won’t she talk to me?”

  “I don’t know. She must have told you?”

  “Nothing. Not a word, believe me, Clyde.”

  “Well but the point is, I suppose, it doesn’t matter why. You can see that.”

  “I did strike your mother once. Did you know?”

  Clyde shrugged, conveying an unwillingness to acknowledge such unpleasant truth, or a reluctance to meddle; at the very least a desire to keep things restful here in hospital. But he had misunderstood and when pressed admitted he did know it; Clyde was recalling a specific occasion, where Orrin had not been referring to one.

  “Because we saw you.”

  “You and El?”

  “Yes.”

  “A long time ago?”

  “Yes, Dad, it was a very long time ago. It was not a very big deal.”

  “Tell me everything you remember about it. Everything. Please.”

  Clyde kept it spare. No adjectives, no emotions. He at fifteen and Elspeth at ten had watched their father push their mother onto a bed in a hotel suite in New York City, and place his hands briefly on her neck.

  “And you hated me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But they do. Why of-course-not? Why shouldn’t you?”

  “It just isn’t so. No one simplifies that way. I wasn’t a one-year-old. And no one age fifteen expects a parent to be perfect.”

  “Ah but they do expect that, Clydie.”

  “I assure you, my dear concussed father, that this was not the all-informing trauma of anyone’s vita. Really. El and I are both happy, healthy, productive people, with nice little lives. Relax about all this stuff.”

  “Everyone tells me to relax. I don’t want to relax. I want to—whatever the opposite is—live. One more thing, though. Did you, did your mother realize you had seen?”

  “Yes. And maybe I was angry in a way—or not angry but guilty about it, guilty for not helping Mom. Because she did try to smooth it over for me.”

  “Tell me everything. Exactly as it happened.”

  “She said you were sick—”

  “Sick?”

  “Physically sick. And you’d had a bad reaction to some medicine you’d been given.”

  “It was a lie.”

  “I suppose it was. I guess one knew that even then. But it did the trick. She was okay if we were, that’s how it was, so of course we were and it all got lost in the shuffle. Honestly I remember the rest of that day much more vividly—Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall. It was the first time you took us to New York and I am positive that Elspeth also recalls the city more clearly than she does that silly scuffle.”

  “A nice word for it, Clydie. You have a nice way about you, and you’re nobody’s fool, either. But really now, if you venerate the old man at all, spring me from this place. God knows I have had my rest.”

  “Soon.”

  “Now. Let me go home and I’ll swear a vow to avoid the rowdy set. To drink up my usual thumbnail in the soft safe bosom of The Club, and to sneeze politely into my hanky. I mean it, I’ll swear to
it. Just do spring me from these sallow walls.”

  Clyde did drive him home that afternoon, though Orrin had stated categorically he would prefer the walk. What he really sought to avert was having his son bear witness to the wreckage of Jack-and-Liz, or see the remains of The Weatherbaby as widely scattered as his distant cousin Humpty-Dumpty. Luckily there were no parking spaces along Filbert.

  “I can get out here. I haven’t got any luggage, you know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Go have what’s left of your Sunday with Phyll and the boys. You’ve done more than enough for me, and I’ll feel worse—maybe even terrible, Clydie—if you try to do more. I can feel a secondary concussion coming on.”

  “Well all right. But I’ll call tonight.”

  “My parole officer? It’s not necessary. I do want to thank you, Clyde—for everything. And I want you to know that I am feeling extremely sound just now.”

  “That’s right. Nothing like a few days in prison to teach a man the true meaning of freedom.”

  “Exactly. I stand deterred, certainly I do.”

  Orrin walked up and let himself into the flat, and at first he was visually confused, caught in a time warp; the rooms were as orderly as a museum corridor. Every hair in place, somehow. And for an instant he felt he really might be starkers after all. Then he spotted the note, and knew without reading it that Eli the relentless liberal had come back to deal with the mess.

  Had vacuumed even, and set two new plants on the dining table, flowering gerania. Between the two was a bottle of Bushmills, or a Bushmills’ bottle as it turned out, filled with sparkling spring water and labelled “the choice of reformed tipplers worldwide.” In the note Eli said he was sorry it had not worked out and that he would be by to visit in the future. He supplied the June rent check, in case Orrin had trouble getting a replacement on short notice.

  Orrin might have bristled at so much patronization from Paperman, except that he was weary, and drained of strong emotions. The truth was Eli had cause, and moreover had done all this with a touch of class. He could not see Eli as the sort to visit his own past and yet maybe even that was for the best. Orrin was pointing toward the future, eager for life-after-sleep, and particularly eager to see each of his clients, to be their doctor.