Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  “What does that mean?” Pauline wanted to know.

  “It means,” he said, “one of us is the next to go.”

  “Well,” Pauline laughed, trying to lighten the mood, “that’s obvious. This is a senior citizens’ home.”

  On one particular Saturday, Ms. Abby did walk around the room. She was looking at the paintings. Some were pretty nice and would sell, she thought. Ms. Abby pushed herself forward and continued to walk with her walker.

  It was an interesting spectacle that filled the residents with fear. The power that this woman had in her boxy red dress. The power that they had given her. It was horrific.

  She called quietly to her sister, “You like that one?”

  Ms. Lora said, “Yeah.”

  Ms. Abby then stopped in front of a painting’s green-

  matted frame of flowers. The painting rested just above Jeb Turnwall’s head. Ms. Abby didn’t even notice him. She didn’t notice his face turning pink and his exhalation of air and his hand moving quickly, quickly for him, as he fumbled to reach the handgun he wore under his sport coat in a holster. He pulled it out and pointed it at Ms. Abby. He could hear people saying something (hushed mumbles, startled burst of sound), and he saw Ms. Abby look down at him as if for the first time. He shot her in her fat stomach. And she stumbled back with brown blood flowing out of her wound. He shot her again in her cheek, and her hips hit the floor, and then her back slammed to meet the linoleum. He shot her one more time while she lay on the floor, and the bullet landed in the side of her chest.

  Jeb sat in his chair, shaking. He wasn’t the same deer hunter. He willed his hands to be still and thought briefly about his youth and how he used to be able to hold the gun with one hand and not two. He rested the gun in his lap and looked around like he’d wet himself. At that moment, he had the eyes of a little boy who had been caught sneaking ice cream or stealing quarters.

  “Jeb!” Pauline called out.

  Ms. Lora screamed. People ran to her. To hold her still.

  People moved to Jeb. To take the gun from him.

  Ms. Lora was in shock, crying. Of course, she was trying to figure out what had just happened. A little bit later, she even said to the police officer who was talking to her, “What just happened? She was my sister? Why did this happen? What’s wrong with that man? Why did he shoot her?” Mostly, she cried. She cried on an officer’s shoulder and into the palms of her hands. She cried and looked around to see where she was. She was outside in the parking lot. The residents had walked her out just before the cops came.

  An officer offered to drive her home.

  “No,” she said.

  An officer told her where they were taking her sister. “Would you like us to take you there too, ma’am?”

  She watched as Jeb Turnwall was driven away in cuffs. It became clear she had to go somewhere. She couldn’t just stand there in shock. But she could no longer move. This tall, wiry woman could not move her legs. One of her hands rested on the officer’s shoulder, and she began to sense his discomfort.

  When Ms. Lora saw her sister’s body being wheeled out, she forced herself to lift her foot and point it in the direction of her sister. “Yes,” she said, “I will go to where my sister is going.”

  “Okay, ma’am.”

  She held the officer’s arm as she walked up the incline to the street where his squad car sat. It was near her car. “I’ll take my own car. Can you follow me?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “You see,” she said, “you see, I don’t want to get lost. I am not from around here.” And she began to cry again. A slow weeping that ended in her gasping for breath. “No, I will follow you,” she said to the officer.

  “Okay, ma’am.”

  “I will follow you.” She began to breathe regularly.

  “Okay.” He helped her into her car.

  “I’m ready,” she said. “I will follow you out. I will follow you out.”

  PART II

  Sweet Misery Blues

  FRIENDSHIP

  by Jane Hamilton

  Ogden Avenue

  We had reached the point in our lives when we were most interested in bicycles. Not make and material, and repair was beyond us—please God, let us never have to patch a tire or monkey with a chain. We were all about the riding. That’s how we explained ourselves. Every morning we woke wishing we could mount that simplest of machines—we did admire the elegance of our Treks and our Schwinns. At home and at work and in spin class, too, we wanted nothing more than to vanish, sunshine or light rain, into the great wide open.

  It’s a developmental phase, we thought. First comes love, then comes marriage, the baby in the carriage, including getting out the door to earn a living, and when much of that is done, you’ll want a double or triple crankset, twenty-seven gears, padded shorts, some crotch butter. You’re riding; the cool air is on your bare arms. It is so simple to be happy.

  There were four of us with this affliction, middle-aged ladies on bikes, bringing to mind, of course, Margaret Hamilton. I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too. We claimed that joke as our own before anyone else could say it. In light of this phase, we weren’t taken by complete surprise when Sally John—her first name, a Southern thing—suggested we sign up for a bike trip, seven days in the Pyrenees.

  “Mountains,” one of us noted.

  Sixty miles a day, a Sisyphean change of elevation, no sweetly rolling hills made by the last what-have-you glacier but jagged mountains that in an instant had been thrust into the world. Proof you don’t want to venture too far beneath the surface.

  It’s hard to say if the going up the mountain or sailing down frightened us more. We knew we’d have to train, that the trip would challenge us at every level, test our limits, etc. In our consideration, though, we certainly didn’t think, This is the perfect crime. We thought, Jesus Christ, will we be strong enough, fast enough, and mentally prepared? We marveled at our friend, laughing, saying, “Sally John suggested this!”

  “Seriously?” one of us would chime in.

  Sally John was—there is no other way to say this—the fat friend among us. Thirty to fifty pounds overweight on any given day. A lot of extra baggage to haul up the mountain. A big-boned beauty. That’s what her husband was said to call her in the privacy of their bedroom. Sally John letting us in on their pillow talk. “My big-boned beauty,” he would say out loud in his satisfaction. Edwin was his name. He himself was a man you’d term scrawny if you saw him in his everyday clothing.

  Despite her weight, she was not unfit, Sally John. She was the least cycle-crazed of us, but she enjoyed riding her bike, a commuter, a hybrid with upright handlebars, a basket, a bell. Her primary exercise, her religion, which she shared with her trainer, was bench pressing. We feigned interest but did not listen as closely as good friends should. Sally John could get very technical about body mechanics.

  At the time of our trip, Edwin and Sally John, the Abbots, had been living in Milwaukee for about a year. We later came to blame Milwaukee, or, rather, we held the Cream City responsible for what happened. Milwaukee, a place that frankly held no fascination for us. Edwin—never Ed—and Sally John had been New Yorkers for thirty years, their move from the Upper East Side a shock. He’d been a social worker at the VA campus down on 23rd Street, and Sally John had risen up the ranks from a lowly nurse to chief nursing officer at Lennox Hill Hospital. We figured she made at least half a million bucks. Not that it mattered to them. In the nineteenth century, both of their families had produced captains of industry, the lucky Abbots, stupendous stacks of dough still fluttering down upon them, glorious cash from railroads, printing presses, paint, and varnish. Their trust funds had made possible a five-bedroom apartment not far from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. We never got over it, we in our rent-controlled quarters in various parts of the city. Even when the couple had two small daughters, they’d kept a routine of work and pleasure, walking to the museum on Friday nights, for instance
, sitting in the Great Hall Balcony drinking champagne and listening to the offering, usually a string quartet or a pianist. They did so for romance, to keep the flame flickering. The fluted glasses, a soft cheese, a small crusty loaf, a stroll hand-in-hand to look at one great master, and home to bed.

  What made them leave that romance behind for Milwaukee? A row house, that’s what. Edwin’s father died, leaving them a newly refurbished town house on Ogden Avenue, one of the Abbot Row houses. Without telling us, they sold their apartment on 82nd Street. Edwin, a man seemingly without dramatic passions, had persuaded Sally John, telling her the move would invigorate their lives. We said, “Who moves to Milwaukee to be invigorated?” He was as insistent as he’d ever been. The row houses, he explained to us, had been built in 1889 for Edwin Hale Abbot, the president of the Northern Pacific Railway. Sally John’s Edwin had been named in full for his grandfather, her Edwin Hale, a man who, once they’d moved, would have a model train world down in the basement, a world complete with the usual: cows and haystacks, carrot tops in garden rows, tunnels through mountains, a saloon with parking for horses and motorcycles, and hardworking little people outside the general store.

  * * *

  When we first visited we were on the whole politely amazed, only scoffing at the most obvious evidence of philistinism. The di Suvero sculpture at the end of Wisconsin Avenue, for one. Hideously orange, an industrial hulk that blocks the swanlike Calatrava, blazingly white, hovering at the lake’s edge. We took one look at the di Suvero and said, “Are you kidding?” What city would commission Santiago Calatrava to design their art museum, a city with a gorgeous body of water as backdrop, and blot it out in the approach with a third-rate heap of orange-painted steel I-beams?

  Edwin claimed to admire di Suvero’s The Calling, Edwin pleased to defend his new city. He persisted in the conviction that Calatrava admired it too, and indeed had been inspired by it, showing us an interview as proof. It was a form of kindness—we came to believe this—Edwin considering each artist’s mind, Edwin’s suggesting that the illusion of ease and suspended gravity were features each work shared, Edwin, a person who was never dismissive or glib.

  From the start, we had no argument with the row house, my God, we could see the appeal of that real estate. The house had a marble foyer, and although it was narrow, there was the spaciousness of high ceilings and the three floors, plus the basement, each room with comforts designed for delight. The master bath was the size of our living rooms, the long claw-foot tub gleaming on the dais, and the shower had a steam feature you could infuse with eucalyptus. Only in Milwaukee, we used to say to Sally John.

  Sally John had no trouble securing an impressive job in the health care galaxy there, chief of some part of that Milky Way. She was fantastically smart, and if she’d been born later, in the 1980s rather than the 1960s, and if she hadn’t been such a self-doubter, she could have been a brain surgeon. When we were together, the three of us without Sally John, we always spent a substantial portion of our time discussing her. You might say she was our main subject, Mrs. Abbot cut out from the big topic of our friendship. Through the decades we’d often talked about her habit, the glitch where, in spite of her self-doubt, she’d choose difficult new hobbies, or she’d find herself promoted to jobs that seemed to her impossible. Jobs, we agreed, that would push an average woman over the edge. She’d been put in charge of 3,500 health care providers at a major institution when she was thirty-three, for instance. She’d taken up the oboe at age forty. Who does that? At forty-

  five she gained membership to an exclusive fitness club on Park Avenue, even though she always worried about being socially inferior to just about everyone. It seemed not to have bolstered her confidence, knowing that her great-grandparents had been among Mrs. Astor’s chosen Four Hundred in the Gilded Age. Sally John had charmed some doctor-god to death for the fitness club invitation and also smote her trainer, Nolan. There was a period when she spoke of no one but Nolan and the squats he demanded of her, Sally John making us laugh as no one else could.

  Although we’d been witness to Sally John’s mode of operation starting in college, it was in the Pyrenees that we witnessed her methods at close range. It was in France that our understanding was refreshed—Ah, yes, this is how she’s always exercised her personality, this is how she gets what she wants. We once again had to stand in awe of our friend. She’d chosen a trip that was well out of her league, she’d required that we accompany her, and then, once we landed in the village of Montjardin, she wasted no time zeroing in on the alpha male, Coach Martin, the leader of our band of eight bike riders. At the first dinner, the meet-and-greet, she grabbed the seat next to him. She soon made herself vulnerable. Hand to her bosom, her large blue eyes tearing up—she confessed to fear. To doubt. Waving away the long story, the remote father, the intractable mother, the beautiful older sister, she wouldn’t bore him with the details of her upbringing. A therapy animal, a purse-sized dog, had been helpful to her through her twenties, before anyone had thought of such a thing. But she did want him to know, her failings aside, that she was not a wilting flower. She was committed to the trip, she was serious about the mountains, she wanted to learn, to improve, to grow. As a cyclist and a person. She laughed, she cried, Sally John athletically drinking the red wine of the region.

  We reflected that in Sally John’s universe the alpha male always came to her aid. There was not a story in which the man refuses her or is unmoved by her appeal. Often, it has to be said, the engagement with the head honcho resulted in sexual intercourse, the affairs sometimes long-term.

  How much did Edwin mind? As a therapist, he presumably understood personality types and disorders at a deep level, through the years treating narcissists and maybe a few sociopaths as well as people with regular old unhappiness. Sally John, six feet tall, with high plush breasts, had a most wonderful face and terrific hair. We were always raving about her blond hair, the highlights so natural looking, hair that even into her fifties was silky. She’d wear it in a French twist, or one ropey French braid, or two braids of no nation, wrapping them around her head as if she were going up the path to fetch her sheep. Her gigantic eyes were a lovely soft blue, and her lashes startling black, the tears shining in them, little glistening ornaments. Skin: creamy and smooth. A big juicy mouth that opened with a musical laugh. She couldn’t help telling us that her lovers often remarked that she was amazingly wet. It’s not that we were prim, generally, but that report embarrassed us. “Wow,” one of us said. “Huh,” another pronounced. Out of range, we cried, “She thinks vaginal lubrication is an accomplishment!” We said, “Put that on her tombstone: Here lies Sally John. She was amazingly wet.”

  Did Edwin understand her? A question we couldn’t help posing. The answer varying. As opposites attract at first glance, he was quiet, morally upright, and dry. You might even conclude he was a bore. His pale, narrow face, his small brown eyes, the nondescript hair—none of his features drew attention. At their dinner table, he usually said very little, Sally John regaling her guests with hospital and insurance horrors, most always with policy that supported what sounded like malpractice. She’d turn to her husband now and again to say, “Isn’t that right, dear?”

  “Oh, yes.” He always agreed. If he rarely laughed it was because he was serving and clearing the dishes and tasting the sauce in the hopes it was transcendent. He cooked, reason enough, we always thought, to remain madly in love with him. He was not humorless, that is certain. Still, if you could make him light up or even snort, you felt as if you’d cracked into a vault. He enjoyed crisp assessments of politicians and short tales of absurdity that were true. There was nothing more rewarding than Edwin’s smile; his face transformed: warmth, appreciation, perhaps even mercy shining upon us. Possibly he’d forgiven us for slandering the di Suvero and calling the people of Milwaukee barbarians. We suspected he knew that we knew everything and that we knew he knew. Not only about the lovers, but also about our being privy to the Abbots’ sexual
routines and proclivities. Every time Sally John suggested a roll in the hay he was ready at once. We knew that his member was not as aggressively hard and long as one of the lovers’—which further endeared him to us. We knew that he was always grateful. “My big-boned beauty,” etc. We did feel that we understood his suffering, and perhaps most important, we were sure that without the rock of Edwin Hale Abbot, Sally John would have imploded, that personality of hers busting apart, the woman shattered.

  We grew even fonder of him after he moved to Milwaukee. The old brew town seemed in fact to invigorate him. He had color in his cheeks; his eyes seemed to open wider; there was a lightness not only in his step but in his being. We’d say something mildly amusing, and he’d laugh, one vibrant ha. When we came into the library he’d look up from his book, he’d shake off his deep thought and invite us to sit, inquiring about our work, our husbands, the grown children, his interest, after all our years in his company, marvelously genuine. It was almost as if he felt an urgency, now that we were in our fifties, to get to know us more fully.

  Every morning, in the perfectly appointed bedroom, he hopped from the bed that seemed like a king and a half, an emperor bed, Sally John, legs splayed, occupying far more than her own side. He’d walk into the dressing room to put on his biker duds, his shiny black shorts, the glossy yellow jersey, in minutes ready to head out to the path along the lake. It was he who was the real biker. Fifty miles even in the rain, eighty to a hundred on Saturday. No slouch, Edwin Hale Abbot. He’d explain away his strength saying, “Yes, but it’s flat.”

  Among ourselves, we admired his tight little glutes, his knotted calves, his waifish but steely thighs, the general buffness of his torso—so much revealed in the biking costume. He had no interest in joining a group, no desire for a band of brothers who’d draft and compare their customized bikes, who’d gather to perform maintenance. He’d strike out, maybe as happy as he’d ever been. Riding through woods, right in the city, coming upon a beer garden tucked away off the path in a forest. Edwin in a fairy tale, the gingerbread house through the thicket, the possibility for the brief companionship of strangers or a magical conversation with a squirrel. Back on the bike, he’d pedal up through Brown Deer toward Port Washington. Maybe he’d find a different way home, Sally John off to work, the mess of her breakfast dishes in the sink. He’d clean up, eat his own cereal, take a shower, put on his civilian clothes, and begin his day receiving patients in the downstairs office. Most typically he saw couples breaking apart, teenagers with depression and anxiety, young men searching for meaning, women hoping to find love.