The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

by Michael Chabon

  “She was a very beautiful woman,” said my father. “She looked like Jennifer Jones. I don’t suppose you know who she is?”

  “Jennifer Jones!” said Phlox. “Of course I know who she is! Portrait of Jenny is my favorite movie in the whole world!” She tossed her head, pretending to have been insulted.

  “Indeed? My apologies,” said my father, and he pursed his lips and lifted one eyebrow, pretending to have gained new respect for her, or perhaps her admiration for Jennifer Jones really did impress him.

  “I can see it in Art,” she said, turning to run a slender finger along the ridge over my left eye, and I thought: Oh, no. “He has Jennifer Jones eyebrows.”

  “And you,” said my father, mocking and flirtatious, “have the eyebrows and the nose of the young Joan Crawford. In, say, Grand Hotel.”

  “That’s my ninth-favorite movie in the whole world,” said Phlox.

  “She ranks everything,” I said. “She has it all figured out.”

  “I can see that,” said my father, and from his tone one knew that he thought her either delightful or the most frivolous young woman he had ever met. Then he glared at me again, for one instant.

  Over the main course he explained the Diaspora and carbon 14 dating (which Phlox just as easily could have explained to him) and gave a short history of Swiss banking. Cannoli were accompanied by coffee and an embarrassing account of my first visit, as a small child, to the ocean, which I had mistaken for a vast expanse of fruit juice. My father was wonderful. We laughed and laughed. Everything was exactly as it had not been when I first presented Claire. Phlox kept administering gentle squeezes of delight to my thigh, under the table.

  At last she rose and excused herself, with a downward look of modesty which seemed to suggest that we shouldn’t hesitate to discuss her while she was away. And although I was in terrible doubt about my father’s feelings just then, and although I knew better than to expect him, even under the best circumstances, to comment on her before he’d passed a night of careful and jovian consideration, her blush, her murmured farewell-for-now, her lowered eyelids, all seemed so confident that nothing ill would be said about her in her absence that I risked it.

  “Isn’t she nice?” I said.

  “Mm.” My father stared at me, his big eyebrows knotted over the pink top of his nose, and I saw the muscles gathering along his jaw. I began to recoil even before he spoke.

  “What’s wrong with you? I don’t understand you.” He pitched his voice high and spoke quickly, but not very loud. I knew that it wasn’t Phlox who had upset him. My father was hurt, and extremely hurt, or this, too, would have waited until the next day.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “Don’t you remember your mother? You were almost thirteen years old when she passed away.” He wiped his fingers angrily on his napkin and threw it down.

  “Of course I remember her, Dad, Of course I do. Dad, can we please not talk about this now? I don’t care if you make me cry again, but I’d rather not do it in front of Phlox.”

  “Don’t you tell her anything about your mother? Obviously she must have asked you; she practically interviewed me.” I hoped this wasn’t some kind of insult. “What did you say when she asked you all those things she just asked me?”

  “I—” My chin shook. I watched the red light of the restaurant wink across my water glass. “I don’t know. I told her…I didn’t feel like…going into it. She understood. And…you and I never…talk about it, do we? So why…Tomorrow, Dad, please.”

  I felt as though I were attempting to hold down all the blind pale things that lived in the black waters of my gut, and that if he asked me one more plaintive question in that wounded tone of voice it would all be over. I studied as deeply as I could the drops of condensation on the glittering sides of my glass. Then I heard feet along the thick carpet behind me, and my father made an odd sound, a short cluck. I let go my breath and turned to face Phlox and comfort. Instead there was a fat stomach.

  “Art!” said Uncle Lenny Stern. “Joe! Art and Joe, father and son, man to man, hey? Heehee. Man to man!”

  “Uncle Lenny,” I said, managing to remember to take his hand, which was sweaty as ever. It didn’t occur to me that perhaps I was still expected to kiss his scratchy cheek. He wasn’t really my uncle, after all. “I must be dreaming.”

  He laughed again; however, I was, for a moment, half-serious. I thought I must be dreaming a horrible transformation dream in which my blue-and-white-flowered Phlox had become a short, giggling, egg-shaped Jewish gangster. What my father had said to me, indeed, was what he often said in my dreams. But then, behind Lenny, I saw a section of Elaine Stern—her shoulder, I thought—and, behind her, part of Phlox, who stood, eyebrows raised, mouth open, watching as this tremendous woman and her attendant miasma of White Shoulders engulfed me. Aunt Elaine’s kisses always hurt one’s face; I used to call her the Pincher.

  “Actually,” said my father, “it isn’t quite man to man. Introduce your friend, Art.”

  He pointed to Phlox, and there was a general whirling around.

  “Uncle Lenny Stern, Aunt Elaine, this is Miss Phlox Lombardi. Phlox.”

  “Oh, isn’t she gorgeous!” said Aunt Elaine. She crushed the back of my neck in her fingers. “And how do you like this handsome young man, eh? A prince!” She shook my head like a pompon.

  “They aren’t really my uncle and aunt,” I said.

  “I like him very well,” said Phlox, and she held out a limp, pretty hand to one of the most notorious lieutenants in Pittsburgh organized crime. We made space for them at our table, which was wrecked, strewn with napkins and spots of red sauce, and two menus were brought, and more coffee. I leaned over to Phlox and whispered that we weren’t going to be free for a while yet.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “They’re fun.”

  “Please,” I said. I sat back and watched my Uncle Lenny; I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He drew my father into a discussion of mutual funds and waved his arms around. His skin was Florida brown; as he got older he spent less and less time in the city of his birth, and the FBI listened in on more and more long-distance calls from West Palm Beach. I knew I was not the only one in the restaurant who watched him. I turned around and saw a couple of dark-haired men at a far table, probably brothers; they nodded to me, and without even thinking I sought out the bulges under their jackets, an ancient reflex of mine, and in the next moment I underwent the equally ancient fantasy of running around to the other side of the table to strangle Lenny Stern. I didn’t want to kill him, really. It was a just a ten-year-old’s desire to see a little shooting.

  Elaine asked Phlox a bunch of questions about her “people,” then recited an impressive list of Pittsburgh Italians with whom she was “like that,” laying one finger over the other. It developed that Phlox’s maternal grandmother was the aunt of a woman whose home and card table Elaine had graced with her giant presence many times in the 1950s. At this revelation, my feelings, interrupted at a crisis moment by the new arrivals and held in dazed suspense for the past ten minutes, began to wriggle and stretch and prickle, like frozen toes under a stream of warm water. They were very mixed. I found it strangely pleasing that, beyond all the new and crucial connections between me and Phlox, there could also be this old and silly connection of families; I felt the lover’s shocked but unsurprised love of anything that appears to suggest the whimsical engines of destiny.

  And yet this link also confirmed that Phlox was now hopelessly mixed up with my family. She’d met not only my father, which I hadn’t wanted, but Lenny Stern, and if she just turned around she would also see Them, the two ugly men with guns, who were the lion and the unicorn of my family’s coat of arms. I gripped the edge of the table. All of the people I spent time with and loved, rather than helping to take me out of the world into which I’d been born, were being pulled into it: Phlox, the cousin of some dead Mafia wife, was eating a dinner paid for by the Washington Family; the fat, powerful man s
lapping my father’s sleeve and eyeing her across the table was, though distantly, Cleveland’s boss; and now—I remembered with alarm—Cleveland, too, was threatening to come into contact with my father. I might have doubted that he would do it, had he not been Cleveland. The more I thought on these things, the more I felt the heavy food sliding slowly and murderously, like pack ice, through my stomach. There are head people, who suffer from sudden migraines, and there are stomach people, like me.

  “Ah, yeah, Marjorie, my God.” Lenny’s voice rose up out of his quite conversation with my father, and occupied the table. I sat bolt upright. “Floss, it’s a real shame you couldn’t of met Art’s mother. She was a wonderful girl. Played the piano like an angel. She—was—beautiful. Laine?”

  “I could forget? An angel. Art? An angel.”

  I looked at Phlox, who looked at me as though I looked upset, and then at my father, who sighed. He seemed suddenly, very tired.

  “I remember,” I said. “Excuse me.” I stood up and went into the men’s room, where I knelt with my head over the toilet, and was sick, on and off, for two hundred and forty thundering clicks of the quartz watch my father had given to me at graduation.

  “Art,” said Phlox, later. We were in her bed. There was the green glow of her radio dial and the faint, lost voice of Patti Page singing “Old Cape Cod.” “What happened? Tell me. It was rude to leave like that. I’m embarrassed.”

  I spoke into her pillow, which smelled of Opium and soap. “My father understood. Don’t worry about Lenny and Elaine.”

  “But what happened? Is it your mother? Why can’t anyone mention her without you getting upset?”

  I pressed up against her, spoonwise, and spoke over the soft and slightly damp lip of her ear. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Everyone has some things he doesn’t like to discuss, no?”

  “You have too many,” said Phlox.

  “This song always kills me,” I said.

  She sighed, and then gave up. “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nostalgia. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn’t even alive.”

  “That’s what I do to you too,” she said. “I’ll just bet.”

  It was what everything I loved did to me.

  15

  THE MUSEUM OF REAL LIFE

  HANGING OUT AT THE Cloud Factory on the hottest day of the year, shoulders to the wire fence, the sky still that yellow Pittsburgh gray, but the sweat already pasting the hair to my forehead and the cotton to the small of my back. Cleveland was ten minutes late. I looked at the black windowless flank of the Carnegie Institute, watched people slip down the back stairs to the rear door of the museum cafeteria; they had nice old Slovak ladies in there who wore clear plastic gloves and served spaetzle and ham and other heavy things. I thought about how I used to prefer that cafeteria to the dinosaurs, the diamonds, and even the mummies. Then I watched the impenetrable Cloud Factory, which was running full tilt, one ideal cloud after another flourishing from its valve and drifting off; they looked dry somehow, crisp and white against the dull, humid sky. I tilted back my head and blew big tangles of cigarette smoke into the air in time with the clicks of the Factory. That morning after breakfast, Phlox and I had screamed at each other for the first time. Now my hands were shaking.

  She hadn’t wanted me to leave her bed, or her breakfast table, or her lap as I sat in it, lacing my shoes. But I was getting anxious; it had been three days since I’d last spoken to Arthur or Cleveland, and three days, I calculated, was three percent of my summer, which seemed a terrible amount of time to lose. My clear June Technicolor dream of a summer spent fluttering ever upward, like a paper airplane over the heat and hubbub of Times Square, had not faded; all my stupid hopes were still pinned to the stupid two of them. I had to see Cleveland, that was what I felt, even if it was to enter with him the world I had said I never would enter. What I had screamed at Phlox was something else, however; I have no memory of what I said, but I’m sure it was irrational, nasty, and petty. One cigarette later, I heard the loud, slobbering cough of Cleveland’s motorcycle. He popped the curb at the end of the Schenley Park bridge, and I started over to him, but then I saw that he’d killed the engine and was swinging off the saddle and hanging his helmet on the bar; so I stopped, and stood, and waited some more.

  We shook hands, then he walked right past me, up to the padlocked gate of the Cloud Factory, where he put his fingers through the diamond-shaped gaps in the fence and looked up at the magic valve. I went to stand beside him, but watched his face and not the hissing white production, except for what I could see of it in the lenses of his eyeglasses. He was unshowered, his long hair limp and sticky, a black smudge on his cheek. From something about the expression on his face, the tense fold of his eyelids, the dry lips, I guessed that he was hung over, but he smiled up at the infant clouds and rattled the gate—happily, I thought.

  “Careful,” I said. “You might tear it off.”

  “I did once.”

  “Sure.”

  “You know, this damn Cloud Factory…” He tightened his grip on the wire and pulled.

  “What?”

  He looked at me. I watched his knuckles turn pale.

  “Do you know where I’m taking you today?”

  “I guess. Cleveland, what?”

  “I’m broke, Bechstein, I don’t have a dime.” His voice sounded sandy.

  “So? Look, I know why people start working for Uncle Lenny.”

  “No, you don’t.” He pulled harder on the thick wires of the fence. “No, you don’t. To hell with money. And from hell with money. To and from hell with money. I’m broke…” His voice trailed off. “Something has to change. I love Jane, Bechstein.”

  I saw now that he was not just hung over; he was still drunk. He probably hadn’t been to bed yet.

  “You always tell me you love Jane when you’re drunk.” He didn’t answer. “Okay, so let’s go, Virgil. Shock me.”

  We went over to the big black BMW, leaving behind us two hand-sized bulges in the fence. You could still make them out from fifty yards away, two little blurs in the pattern of wire.

  We rode through strange sections to a part of the city that I hardly knew. I knew, in fact, only that there was another good Italian restaurant somewhere around there; my father often mentioned it. We were at the foot of one of the hillside neighborhoods, its houses sparse up along the distant ridge, but coming thicker and thicker toward the bottom, like a cataract, one atop another, sideways and backward and connected by crazy catwalks and staircases, and all tumbling downhill to the river—the Allegheny or the Monongahela, I was not sure which. I made out some children playing on one of the few high streets that cut across the hillside, and a car, and two women talking on a far back porch.

  Before he stopped the engine, Cleveland said something I didn’t catch. In the sudden silence I asked him to repeat it.

  “This, this is my country,” he said, with a broad Charlton Heston sweep of his arm, “and these, these are my people.”

  We started up one of the concrete stairways, which shifted back and forth among the knots of houses, all the way to the top; it looked like a long way.

  “There’s a road, but I like to make a stealthy approach. Don’t worry, we only have to go as far as the Second Circle.” His heels tocked concrete, steadily, slowly, and our breath came more quickly with each landing.

  “Is this a poor neighborhood?”

  “About to get poorer.”

  “How much poorer?”

  “Depends on the vig.”

  “The vig.”

  “Depends.”

  “Oh.”

  That was it for a while. Cleveland stopped once and mopped his forehead with a rose bandanna. He said the agents in his bloodstream were being oxidized too quickly. We were up in the midst of things now, and I looked back down to the motorcycle, and beyond it to the river, its water the color of the water in a jar of used paintbrushes.

  “The lovely Mon
ongahela,” I said.

  “That’s the Allegheny, Doctor Fact,” said Cleveland. “Okay, I’m better now. Come.”

  Another few minutes of silent climbing brought us to a long road that ran perpendicular to the staircase. On the left the road curved all the way down the hill, and on the right it rose to the ridge, which, I now saw, was not as sparse as it had seemed from the bottom. There was a church up there, with a big red sign that said Jesus did something: saved, lived, gave—I couldn’t make out the verb. Cleveland and I gasped for a few moments, then I followed him up the road. Two motorcycles flew past with a huge racket, and we hugged the shoulder to get out of their deafening way. They came extremely close, the near bike with its helmeted enormous rider almost nicking my hip. Cleveland tried to pound its back fender as it pulled away.

  “Assholes. Jesus, I just relived every cigarette I ever smoked,” he said, panting.

  “Cleveland, why are you taking me here? Do I need to see this?”

  “What do you think you’re going to see?”

  “Sad people.”

  “Never hurts to see sad people. Anyway, it’ll give you something to tell your dad.”

  “Right.” Dad. “Do you know what my dad would say if I told him I made the rounds with one of Lenny Stern’s pickup boys? He’d say, ‘I want you out of Pittsburgh. You’ve developed too many unsavory associates.’ No, he’d say, ‘Are you doing this to punish me, Art?’ ”

  He spun and faced me. “I told you I’m not Lenny Stern’s anything.”