Love and Shame and Love

by Peter Orner

  KAT: Charlotte’s nuts.

  POPPER: Why?

  KAT: Because it makes no sense. Anybody who drowns is eventually burped up onto the beach.

  POPPER: Urped. Not everybody. What if you’re tied down by something? She’s talking about staying on the bottom for good. She’s talking about going down with the ship of love and never coming back to the surface—

  KAT: And I’m saying eventually you wash up—She wants to drown in love and not be urped. She can’t have both.

  POPPER: It’s a metaphor.

  KAT: Meaning what?

  POPPER: I just said it. If you’re not up to love, if you falter, if you lack the courage, it dies and you end up—well—urped. No better word for—

  KAT: Urped! We’re all urped, Popper. Either way, urped no matter what we do. And her leaving her husband had nothing to do with running from respectability or family. Charlotte’s afraid of something like everybody’s afraid of something.

  POPPER: What?

  KAT: Other choices. Everybody’s afraid of other choices.

  Silence. He turns the page. The wind in the leaves. Kat watches the regal white ashes hardly sway. Or maybe they are box elders…

  POPPER: What about this? I mean us. Love if you will. Because it can’t last, not even in Utah.

  KAT: I like that better.

  MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND

  She wasn’t just from northern Wisconsin, she was from the top of the top of northern Wisconsin. Ashland, on the south shore of Lake Superior. Her father taught at Northland College. Where hippies go to freeze, Kat said. Her neighbor, the alcoholic astronomer lying on his back in the yard with a bottle of Jim Beam, raging at the clouds about the aurora borealis, how there’s no aurora borealis like our aurora borealis and everybody else’s borealises can go fuck themselves. Her high school boyfriend. He had a van with orange shag in the back where she lost her virginity, an idiot phrase if there ever was one, Kat said, because she also lost actual things back there, too—her keys, a comb, a roach clip, ten bucks, a Guatemalan necklace. Her parents’ wedding in Duluth. How her mother’s mother and her father’s mother refused to sanctify the union of a lace-curtain Irish girl and a radical anarchist Jew by attending the ceremony, so they sent their respective husbands, who came and played their parts. Her mother’s father, his long ruddy face stoic. Your mother’s heart, dear, will mend with the advent of children, and her father’s father, a wobbly kibitzer pointing to Kat’s mom and muttering, A beautiful strawberry girl, why all the fuss, why all the disunion over a strawberry girl? Their house on Broadway Street, Superior at the end of the block, the ore docks reaching out into the lake like skyscrapers flat on their backs.

  Her room, that attic tree-house room. 1096 Olivia, Ann Arbor. Three sides of windows and a bed. All the days and nights of 1096 Olivia, the branches scratching against the panes. What about the day her roommates were gone and the landlord came over while they were fucking and jammed his finger in the buzzer like he knew what they were up to up there? From the window Popper could see the top of his head and Kat said, Hey, faster, I think it’s the landlord. And when they finally went downstairs and she opened the door to him, Kat said, “Terribly sorry we took so long, Mr. Delano, we were just finishing screwing.” The man looked at her with bafflement and then with real fear, and, smiling with his teeth, backing away, said, “I’ll come back Sunday to plaster.”

  Her books. They line the low shelves. V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Chomsky, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Walden Two, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, The Brothers Karamazov, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Ward Six and Other Stories, Manchild in the Promised Land, Call It Sleep.

  Popper fingered The Brothers Karamazov. “My dad’s like the father in this one.”

  “Are you going to murder him?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  College? What else is there to remember? In college, I wrote small stories where nothing much happened; read books nobody asked me to—It’s where I met Kat—

  Try to not remember.

  Always more. The mole inside her left armpit. The way she always ate with her hand over her mouth. The time she wanted to legally change her name to Bernadette Peters. Because isn’t she the perfect concoction of brains and beauty and airhead? Why shouldn’t the state recognize my right to honor her? Or the time they listened to Astral Weeks for two hours a day for six weeks and could air-violin all the violin parts on “Madame George.” And what about the storm on that canoe trip? The storm on that island beach in the Quetico, the hours and the hours of that storm, the two of them in the leaking tent, drenched sleeping bags, drenched clothes, the thunder above their heads, ceaseless like some gagging god, Popper trying to plug holes with sogged underwear, and Kat saying, “Aw fuck, Popper, we’re going to die Canadians.”

  1308 Lunt

  2

  A BACKGROUND GIRL

  After all, an entire nation consists only of certain isolated incidents, does it not?

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

  CENTURY OF PROGRESS

  Chicago, 1933

  What is the temperature?

  This question asked every day, not only by the millions who are attending the Century of Progress, but also by people all over the globe who are not fortunate enough to see these wonders, is being answered for you and yours by this two hundred foot high thermometer that the Indian Refining Company erected as a monument to Chicago’s climate.

  —Sponsored by Havoline Motor Oil

  Bernice Slansky scoffs, unimpressed. Even she knows they can make a thermometer small enough to fit in your pocket. And to jam up other places just fine! This is how they are going to pull the world out of its messes, by building Jack and the Giant Beanstalk thermometers? Fee-fi-fo-fum! Not that she cares. No, the world can do whatever it likes. Bankrupt is fine with me. I’m going to be a dancer. Don’t tell Mother. Then I’m going to move to Moscow like Isadora Duncan, marry a Bolshevik, and dance, dance. Because the world will always need and not need dancers in the same ratio, progress, no progress, she thinks as she twirls across the mass of hats and women in clackety shoes, looking for her lost in the crowd father.

  September 4, 1944

  Mrs. Seymour Popper

  1308 Lunt Avenue

  Chicago 26, Illinois

  Angel, I got through today pretty well considering how much I miss you and the children—At least the schoolwork is easing up, thank God—the toughest course is navigation, which is right up my alley—All those hours up and down the Calumet River—You know, New York is a funny place—The Jews here for instance are in such numbers that they don’t make any bones about their existence—They broadcast it—going to the ball game in Brooklyn I passed a building with a sign on it: SCHNORRERS CLUB—I almost fell off my seat laughing—Oh, Beanie, I don’t know what to do—At times I have such a great feeling of exhilaration and I’m all for going through with this with all the resolution I can muster—Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition—Other times I’m down in the dumps again and my heart cries out just to be with you and the babies and the hell with everything—Counsel me, darling, I’m here all alone—

  Seymour

  Fort Schuyler

  Bronx Station, New York City

  BERNICE

  Chicago, 1951

  She stands before the mirrors in the ballet studio on East Jackson Boulevard. Sweat leaks down her face, her neck, her chest, soaking the front of her leotard. This body, this sweat. It all might be over, but nobody can take away this body, this sweat. Even at this small-time level. And, yes, once there was more. Yes, once the great Lincoln Kirstein himself had seen her dancing for Ruth Page in Frankie and Johnny at the Chicago Opera. Bernice was only a background girl, nobody special, but after the performance—how often does she remember this?—while the principals, Fay and Irene, and the rest of the pratty titterers were talking a mile a minute, he approached her, bland Bernice, hi
s huge forehead gleaming, and said, as if nothing could be more simple, Why not come dance in New York?

  So she didn’t have the talent to stay. Who says anybody has to have the talent to stay? She went, didn’t she?

  Bernice extends her arms, slides, runs a step, a grand fouetté right, then half-turns. Pauses. Muffs a tour jeté. Lands, turns, slides right, slides left, and is about to leap again—

  Telly, the office girl, pokes her head into the studio. Long-boned, storklike, dreamy, can dance.

  “Bernice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your son’s here. Handsome.”

  Bernice grips the bar and raises her left leg. In the mirror she examines the small pouches below her eyes. No matter how much sleep she gets—the unstoppable droop.

  She was nineteen. She came home from New York four months later.

  “Tell him I’m busy. My handbag is on the bench. Tell him he can take what he needs.”

  Her body slackens. Her men, their need. Seymour came back from the war terrified of his own children. Esther’s crying in the night used to send him over the edge of the bed. Man overboard! The man will never get over the war. He felt so alive, he says. They should have sent women to fight the Japs. We wouldn’t have come back sentimental about it after. Drop the bomb and be done with it. We got kids to raise. And now Philip’s growing up like his father. All the talk, the charm, the confidence—but, like Seymour, isn’t something missing? She leaps. Again. Lands wobbly and thinks she knows. Hell, you don’t even need talent. Only a little grace. It’s free, Seymour, Phil, it’s free, my precious dolts. You don’t have to scheme or lie or cheat or bluster for it. Nijinsky knew and he was crazy. He said, I merely leap—and pause.

  When did I start forgetting this myself?

  Now again:

  Grand battement to fifth position—effacé. Right foot in back. Arm in arabesque. Toes never leave the floor. No fancy stuff. Pinch fanny. Front back front. Plié turn and hold it.

  The room begins to fill with students. Bernice stops and mops her neck with a towel.

  September 18, 1944

  Mrs. Seymour Popper

  1308 Lunt Avenue

  Chicago 26, Illinois

  Angel,

  Now I certainly know how you feel—Look, all I can say is that there still happens to be a war on—a tough one—I wish I wasn’t in it, but if I had to do it all over again I suppose I would do it the same way—We both know so many people who broke their necks to stay out—I still can’t say I admire them for their actions—Men like Sid and Milt, yes, they stayed home with their families—But imagine the world, Beanie, if every man shrugged his duty, what would it look like? You think these Japs are kidding around? Your package came today—You certainly sent enough cheese! Thanks a million—

  Seymour

  Fort Schuyler

  Bronx Station, New York City

  SEYMOUR

  Chicago, 1953

  Schnitzel and pfifferling and a hard-cooked egg. You eat on the run like a man of this city—standing up. We are men at feed. One thing these Krauts know how to do is stuff a sausage. Two-dollar lunch at Berghoff’s. Like a mead hall of old. Don’t I remember my Beowulf! Eat. Drink. Go out and kill Grendel. Waiters sail by, hoisting silver trays. Fellow upstarts munch their sandwiches. And when you’re done with him, go and kill his mama. He’ll tell it back at the office. See if any of the literary types know what’s what. Seymour reaches for the crown of his hat and nudges the brim closer to his eyes. Little piece of fat between his front teeth. He niggles it with his tongue. Can’t dislodge. Need toothpick. But not an unpleasant thing, a little fat. Damn, the things I squeeze a little enjoyment out of now. In the war I used to prop my mouth open with toothpicks to stay awake. Prick your gums and you can go for hours. They’re calling this shootout in Korea a war now also. Soon every little pissant fistfight they’re going to call a war.

  Seymour eats alone—in the company of fellow hats, true, but it’s not the same. There’s no camaraderie. And the money game? More brutal in spades than shooting. And there’s no such thing as loyalty in the business of business. He looks out the big window at the scurriers winging by on West Adams, a slither of soap-white light peeks from between the buildings.

  He might have gotten lucky. Yanked offstage early. Lost at sea! Wouldn’t that have been something? Typical dream of the sailor returned. When did I become so average? Long live Seymour; he died in the Pacific, his whole life ahead of him. You hear about Sy Popper? Christ, what a shame. Two kids. Drop-dead wife. Bernice was a ballerina, wasn’t she a ballerina before she married Sy? My God, the man had the whole shebang. Poor Bernice. Not even a rock to go visit.

  1308 LUNT AVENUE

  Chicago, 1959

  Twenty-three years at 1308 Lunt in Rogers Park and Bernice knows every creak in the floorboards. The one at the top of the stairs by Esther’s room that always moans long under her left foot. And what about the little window in the attic, just under the peak of the roof? Once—only one time in all these years did she stoop and look out of it. Impossible to see much through the grime. She’d spat, tried to clean the window with her fingers. The view disappointed her. Only Lunt Avenue through a blur of spit and dirt. The brown lawns, the leafless trees, the new sidewalk, the cars lined up and down the street like ants, bumper to bumper. What had she been expecting to see?

  And tomorrow? Tomorrow we will box ourselves up and move northward to become a new address. But we lug our old ones around with us, don’t we? Isn’t a new house number a sham? At least in the beginning, before it begins to weigh anything? Like those first few hours in a wedding dress when you’re lulled into thinking the ring on your finger will change things.

  Tomorrow, piece by piece, the furniture will be carried out of here, only to be plumped down again on the North Shore: 38 Sylvester Place, Highland Park.

  It’s not that she doesn’t want to leave. It’s that she always wants to leave. After the North Shore, where?

  At the Century of Progress, Bernice remembers wandering into a fortune-teller’s tent and having her future read by a bug-eyed white lady done up to look like a Gypsy. The white Gypsy had gripped her arm and held tight when Bernice laughed in her face.

  “Your eyes, missus, why do they always run?”

  October 2, 1944

  Mrs. Seymour Popper

  1308 Lunt Avenue

  Chicago 26, Illinois

  Look, let’s be clear, I know the score somewhat better than you appear to be willing to give me credit for—I intend to come home to make you and our children a lovely happy life—I’m not quite playing cops and robbers here—This is just one of those things a man has to do—except occasionally a guy likes to feel that at home someone has some understanding—or even God forbid a little pride—we leave for Virginia on Friday—

  Seymour

  Fort Schuyler

  Bronx Station, New York City

  ONE OF US

  Northbrook, Illinois, 1961

  It’s called the Villa Venice, a nightclub and casino in the suburbs, done up in red tassels with waiters dressed as gondoliers. They row you to your table in a real boat down a real canal with water and everything. Sam Giancana owns the place, and his friend Sinatra and his boys, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, are appearing at the grand opening as a favor. Bernice and Seymour Popper are in the crowd, at a table with Sid and Babette Kaufman. Sid got them tickets. Sid Kaufman always gets them tickets.

  A woman at the next table says, “No, he’s a real Jew. I hear he’s got a rabbi and everything.”

  A man says, “Irene, Sammy can buy a rabbi and stick him on the lawn. Hey, you know what they call him in Harlem?”

  “What?”

  “The kosher coon!”

  “Oh, Bill, shush.”

  Dino comes out first and stumbles around a melody, murmuring: Drink to me only, that’s all I ax, ask, and I will drink to you… I left my heart in France and Cisco. The crowd laps it up. Dino’s so saucy. How can you not lov
e Dino?

  Sinatra follows and does a solo number, but he’s languid. Nobody in Chicago wants to hear “Chicago.” It’s embarrassing. What, you think we’re a bunch of yokels out here, Frank? He slows the tempo a little. Toddlin’ town, he says, not singing, talking it, swingin’ town. Still, the crowd doesn’t go for it and the song’s a bomb.

  Finally, Sammy comes on and everybody starts waking up. He introduces himself as Harry Belafonte and starts with a hammed-up “What Kind of Fool Am I?” At first it gets a laugh. Sammy smiles wide, but then keeps going with it, goes deeper into the song. The crowd stops laughing and starts listening. Sammy, my God, that voice. Even mocking Belafonte, even without trying. The man sings a joke and still he sounds like an angel.

  Why can’t I cast away the mask of play and live my life?

  The mobsters in the crowd start scratching themselves. The boy can sing, can’t he now?

  Then the highlight of the night, Frank and Dean join Sammy onstage. This is what everybody came for, the clan clowning. You want to listen to their music, put on a record at home.

  Sammy sings, “She’s Funny That Way.” I’ve got a woman… crazy for me… She’s funny that way… I ain’t got a dollar. Can’t save a cent… She wouldn’t holler…

  “Wouldn’t holler?” Dean says. “That’s too bad.”

  (Crowd giggles.)

  She’d live in a tent.

  “Jewish people don’t live in tents,” Frank says.

  That Frank. He’s not funny till he’s funny, but by God when’s he’s funny—biggest laugh of the night goes to Sinatra.

  “Don’t live in tents!” Sid Kaufman howls. Even Babette laughs a little, and it always takes a lot to get Babette Kaufman to smile. Bernice doesn’t laugh. She only keeps looking at the stage. All night, she’s only been looking toward the stage.