Love and Shame and Love

by Peter Orner

  “My old man and I don’t see eye to eye, Jake, never really have—he’s voting for Nixon again.”

  “So is Vito Marzullo. What are you going to do? A good man, Seymour. How’s his business?”

  “Shaky.”

  Arvey sighs again, longer this time. A bloated sigh, and Philip waits in anticipation of more wisdom he’ll remember. He feels for his own hat. It’s gone. He already checked it with Teddy. He wants to ask him again about Chuckie Dalver. He looks at his shoes and listens to the old man breathe—then realizes it’s his own breathing. Arvey’s gone. Marched right out of the hat check and straight through the revolving door without a word. Philip joins Teddy at the half-door. They watch Arvey out the window hailing his own cab. It’s still sleeting.

  “He took somebody’s hat,” Philip says.

  “Judge Epstein’s,” Teddy says.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “About what?”

  “When Judge Epstein comes for his hat.”

  What kind of question? Colonel Arvey wants a hat, he takes a hat. Teddy stands silent in his yellow vest. The sleet drains down the windows. On the sidewalk, the old man bellows: “Yellow! Checker! Chariot of any color! I have no preference!” South Loop call of the wild.

  Sleet makes a different sound than rain, even hard rain. Philip wishes he could put this washing-away noise into words, but he can’t.

  THE STAIRS

  Leo stuck him in a sleeping bag and launched him down the stairs. He flounced slowly down and thumped into the front hall like a sack of laundry. Then he mudged up the stairs, the sleeping bag following him like the train of a gown. Again, Leo, do it again. Leo sent him with more force, and when he hit the floor, he careened and banged into the wall. In the kitchen, they stopped. His father stuck his head out the swinging kitchen door, the one that opened into the front hall.

  “What was that?”

  His mother’s head appeared from the other kitchen door around the dining room corner. Her face raspberry, her hair tucked behind her ears. “Did you just throw your brother down the stairs?”

  Leo, a hatless Mad Hatter cackling at the top of the stairs, shouts, “This house shall be a democracy!”

  “What?” Phil says. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Again, Leo! Do it again!”

  HOLLIS OSGOOD

  Miriam and Philip hired a houseman. Everybody else in Highland Park seemed to have a maid; only the Poppers had a man. He put up the storm windows. He ran errands in Miriam’s VW Bug. Hollis babysat. He cooked. He slept in a small room in the basement from Tuesday to Friday. Mondays and weekends, the Poppers were on their own. At cocktail parties Hollis would wear a light blue shirt with ruffles and a black bow tie, and serve drinks with jokes and aplomb that always left the guests shrilling: We simply love Hollis. Where on earth did you find him?

  A huge man, nights he’d fall asleep in his basement chair, by the Ping-Pong table, reading by the white light of the television. He liked his novels thick and endless. Shogun and Clan of the Cave Bear. The Thorn Birds. Popper would crawl over the mountain of him and sneak the clicker (one of those prehistoric ones that sounded like a staple gun) out of his hand and lie on the carpet beside his chair and change the channels until the racket would wake Hollis up and he’d say, Rodent, turn it back to Johnny Carson before I count to one and a half.

  He smoked mentholated Kools. He said he had a daughter who lived in Cleveland. But the way he said the word, separating it out, Cleave Land, it sounded, to Popper, as if he meant to say she was dead—or so far away from him that she might as well be. A Korean War vet—Korean Emergency, Hollis called it. Precisely whose emergency, I’m still trying to decipher. He lost two fingers during the battle of Chosin. One was shot off, he said. The other froze off.

  “Zander, which do you think I’d rather go through again?”

  “Shot off. You already told me.”

  When he gripped Popper’s neck, there was always something missing. There was strength, yes, he was strong, but there was also emptiness, and not only because of his missing fingers.

  His stomach, solid as a refrigerator. Popper would make running starts from the back door, sprint into him, and bounce off. Hollis would shout, “Do it again and I’ll call my lawyer on you.” Philip was his lawyer. Philip was everybody’s lawyer.

  Hollis Osgood was born in Alabama. After Korea, he moved to Chicago to look for work. Miriam found him in the Sun-Times classifieds. You get born into a family. You get found in the classifieds.

  Philip stands in the kitchen, squeaky galoshes. “Hollis, you think this floor is mopped? Do I have to do these things myself? Do I have to come home from an endless day and mop this myself?” In memory, Hollis is always taller than he actually was. He wasn’t more than 5′7″, about the same height as Philip. His stomach made him not only bigger but also more substantial, more rooted to the floor. He remembers being worried for his father. Couldn’t Hollis at any time have decided to knock his lawyer down with one lazy swing of his hand?

  STREETLIGHT

  Their neighbor to the west, Mr. McLendon, used to throw rocks at the streetlight on the corner at three in the morning. His aim wasn’t great, and some nights it would take him more than an hour to shatter the bulb. The thing was, he did it buck naked. The only thing he wore was shoes. It must have been that he only did this in summer or on warm spring nights, but Popper can’t keep himself from remembering that he was also out there in the snow.

  Mr. McLendon worked for the phone company, in the yellow Illinois Bell building on Second Street across the street from where Stasha’s (Vienna Beef) used to be. It was said that he married Mrs. McLendon for her love, not her money. Whether she spent any love on him is still open to speculation, but the word was that Mrs. McLendon had tons of money, serious money. She was part of what people called “Old” Highland Park (meaning: before the Jews came). Her house looked like some Southern plantation airlifted to northern Illinois by genies. It had huge white pillars you couldn’t even wrap your arms around. Parked in the garage, a black ’67 Lincoln Continental and a surrey. They never saw much of Mrs. McLendon, but they often saw her dog. Mrs. McLendon had a black miniature schnauzer named Cassandra, actually a succession of miniature black schnauzers named Cassandra. When one Cassandra died, which they did with alarming frequency throughout Popper’s childhood, she got another, the new one meaner than the last.

  And some nights, Mr. McLendon out in the street, throwing rocks at the light. A thin, pale man with hairless legs the color of bone. In the morning, he’d leave the house, an ordinary man in an ordinary suit, a Tribune under his arm.

  “Alex, wake up. He’s out there again.”

  He followed Leo back to his room and they watched him out the window.

  “His wife won’t love him,” Leo said. “He’d rather be dead. But since he lacks courage, he takes it out on Commonwealth Edison, which isn’t a bad choice, really.”

  “Why doesn’t he put some clothes on?”

  “This sort of thing needs to be done as purely as possible.”

  “And in the morning?”

  “In the morning what?”

  “In the morning does he want to be dead?”

  “In the morning he works for Illinois Bell.”

  “Oh.”

  Here is a useless revelation. Popper and his brother witnessed some petty vandalism and (possibly unintentional) exhibitionism in 1973.

  One day he died. There was no announcement, no obituary in the Highland Park News. No one dropped by to pay their respects. Miriam, though, sent over a card. Mrs. McLendon went on calling her dog. Popper would like to call the phone company and ask about Mr. McLendon, but there is no Illinois Bell you can call anymore. The streetlight must have shined into his bedroom window, the one he shared or didn’t share with Mrs. McLendon. But Mr. McLendon’s hatred for it went beyond the light in his eyes, the light that exposed what he didn’t want exposed, Leo told his brother, to the idea
of the light itself. Couldn’t it leave Riparian Lane’s little miseries alone? His wife won’t love him. Isn’t this bad enough? Let a man sleep. Not white but yellow, an unnatural, radioactive egg, that light on the corner of Riparian and Sycamore.

  MEN’S ROOM

  In the private men’s room, the second floor of the Standard Club. The attendant, Mr. Hopkins—white pants, white shirt—sits straight-backed, listening to the radio murmur, a towel draped over his forearm.

  Philip and Arvey, side by side, the tall marble urinals, ice and fruit at the bottom. Hot piss cracks the ice.

  “You’re not dead, Jake.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Tell me something I can use.”

  Arvey’s finished but remains standing before the urinal as if it’s a lectern. Mr. Hopkins coughs into his hand.

  “Something regarding what?”

  “Politics, Jake, what else is there under the sun?”

  “Enough of politics. Napoleon said politics is destiny. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “What did that French midget know about Chicago? Politics is vaudeville.”

  “The colonel returneth!”

  “And power?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Power is my old friend Harry Truman.”

  “The bomb?”

  “Forget the bomb. I’m talking about Doug MacArthur. Compared to MacArthur, Nagasaki was a tennis ball. Truman canned MacArthur not because he was the better man but because he wasn’t and could fire him, anyway.”

  The light in the men’s room. The gleek of the ice cracking. A near-forgotten old man sermonizing to a not-so-successful disciple. The two men move to the sinks to scrub their hands.

  Mr. Hopkins stands silent, washcloths at the ready.

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah, Phil?”

  “I’m going to do it. I’m going to run for Chuckie Dalver’s seat. I think the man’s ripe.”

  Arvey takes a towel from Mr. Hopkins and dries his hands slowly, thoroughly, each finger. “He’s not,” Arvey says. “Not yet, anyway. Dalver’s a zero, but he’s got another two terms in him at least. But go ahead, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  January 25, 1945

  Incidentally, I didn’t like that crack about us never being rich, but we’ll be happy anyway—I have every intention of being rich, and I for one have the utmost confidence in my becoming so, and if I had you right here at this moment, I’d make you rich—It’s got to be rich as hell with all this saving up—and this ship has such a lovely motion—How are things at home?

  AT THE KITCHEN TABLE

  Come into the house through the garage, the mudroom with its retired platoons of rubber boots and galoshes and crinkled sneakers, toes pointing upward, like crushed little boats. Into the kitchen with the small round table about the size of a wagon wheel, the four of them would crowd around, the black iron light fixture, the fat bulbs hanging so low they sometimes grazed their heads. The blue china wedding dishes with the rusty cracks. The kitchen never smells of anything because Hollis spends so much time scrubbing and disinfecting. Dinner, the four of them. Hollis always eats in the basement, though Miriam was always saying we really ought to get a bigger table. Finally Hollis said, “I appreciate the sentiment, Mrs. Popper, the truth is, I prefer to dine alone.”

  Miriam reaches into the freezer for Philip’s Schlitz, and for a moment there’s a loft of snowy air before she shuts the door. Her fingers snap off the top of the silver can and toss the sharp tab in the garbage. She pours the beer down the glass.

  He’s not one of them. They try not to show it. Philip returns from gladiating downtown to a conspiracy of silence.

  To say something, anything, Leo says, “Did you hear the news? Alexander Butterworth says there’s a taping system in the Oval Office.”

  “Butterwho?” Philip says.

  “Alexander Butterworth. An aide to Nixon. He says there’s tapes. That Nixon tapes everything. The truth is going to be on the tapes.”

  “Is it?” Philip says. “The one and only truth? And this Butternut has it? You believe that? Even I’m beginning to sympathize with Nixon. The thing’s become a witchhunt. They’re looking for bodies in every closet.”

  “It’s all recorded,” Leo says. “Everything. Recorded.”

  Beyond Miriam’s head, the window above the sink that looks out into the backyard, where Popper would often see her standing, years of her standing, the sheeny curtains the cat, Louise, tore up. On the counter the little television the President will resign on. The iron pots hanging from long hooks. Above the stove, those mustard-colored tiles in the shape of bells.

  PHIL POPPER PHENOMENAL

  Philip’s campaign for the Illinois State Senate, Thirty-second District. Popper remembers the blazing orange bumper stickers, loud as a crossing-guard sash, emblazoned with the three P’s: Phil Popper Phenomenal. They were more common around the house than on anybody’s cars. It was Miriam who came up with the slogan. It barely fit on the stickers. She was campaign manager and loved it. It got her out of the house.

  “Phenomenal what?” Philip had asked.

  “Oh, just phenomenal phenomenal,” Miriam said.

  Those bumper stickers. And those Phil Popper Phenomenal pens that Popper used to like to take apart and then put back together minus the little spring, so that when somebody went to write with one it wouldn’t work. His father gave anti-Nixon speeches to small yawning audiences across Lake County, Miriam applauding wildly. At home, they strategized at the kitchen table late into the night.

  “You’re not connecting to your audience, Phil.”

  “Maybe I should talk more about Vietnam.”

  “Vietnam is over, Phil.”

  “Is it? I read the other day it was still going on. That Kissinger and Ford—”

  “Don’t save the country. Nobody wants the country saved. What if you talked about crime?”

  “Crime, in Lake County?”

  “People can’t get enough of crime. When it isn’t there, they still want to hear it is coming to get them. You need an issue, Phil, an issue people care about, or at least think they care about.”

  “My issue is, I’m not Chuckie Dalver. What kind of name is Chuckie anyway?”

  “American.”

  The two of them, Miriam and Philip, at the kitchen table, their knees touching beneath the table, between them precinct maps, call lists, cold coffee. Sir Edmund asleep on his mat, the little TV on without volume, the late-night movie on CBS.

  “How do you feel about ERA?”

  “I like women, you know I’ve always liked women.”

  “I know, Phil. What about equal pay?”

  “Sure.”

  “The Zion nuclear power plant. What’s your position?”

  “Of course they’d build a nuclear plant in Zion.”

  “I like that. You even might be able to use it. But it’s not a position.”

  “I’m for the plant.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m against it.”

  “No.”

  “Damn it, Miriam. I can’t be both.”

  “You can. You love the energy source and the jobs. And you’re scared to death of nuclear power. You can’t sleep you’re so afraid of nuclear power. Depends on who asks and how they ask it.”

  “This is serious, I’m trying to—You’ve got everything all twisted. What am I trying to—I want to stand for something.”

  “But you don’t, and since you don’t, my thought is—”

  “All right.”

  “People don’t elect people, they elect visions of themselves, and you’ve got to do something to connect—”

  “I said all right.”

  Leo interrupts, strolling into the kitchen with his little brother hostaged in a headlock. “What about the Crosstown Expressway?”

  “What’s that got to do with Lake County?” Philip says.

  “State money’s going to build it. You thin
k the people out here want to give money so Mayor Daley can build another highway? There’s an issue, Dad. Think local.”

  “Go back upstairs, both of you,” Philip says. “And by the way, if Mayor Daley wants to build a highway, I’m going to send you out there to help tar it, Leo.”

  Still holding his brother’s head in a headlock, Leo says, “Alexander wants juice.” On the little TV, Shelley Winters screams soundlessly, flailing, drowning. “Hey,” Leo says. “Isn’t that Poseidon Adventure?”

  As a family, they went door to door to door. They handed out literature in front of supermarkets, the post office, banks, the A&W in Crystal Lake. In some place called Lincolnshire, Leo and Popper stood on a corner holding Phil Popper Phenomenal signs for three hours until Miriam came to pick them up. Leo lied and said one person honked, and Miriam cheered, “See? We’re getting our message across!”

  “Wait, what’s our message again?”

  “Shush, Leo.”

  During the last week of the election, they rented a double-decker London bus and wandered Lake County looking for votes in grand style. From a loudspeaker, Philip extolled ERA. “You know, I’ve always loved women…” Hollis drove and spoke in an English accent that Popper sometimes repeats to himself in his daydreams like a chant… Cheerio! Cheerio! Won’t you be so good as to vote for my dear friend and yours, Phil Popper, for the State Senate? Quite frankly, and there really is no other way to put it, he’s simply phenom—

  On a side street in Lake Forest lined with oaks, a PPP volunteer, a friend of Bernice’s named Gert Zetland, got hit by a low branch and knocked unconscious.

  A 22 percent drubbing. Chuckie Dalver? The man died in office in the early nineties after eight and a half terms, and even then nobody much remembered he’d been in the legislature all that time. But there’s this. In 1974, Philip Popper ran against him. In October of that year, toward the end of the campaign, Gert Zetland got upended by a tree and needed eighteen stitches in her forehead, a fact that remains remembered in stone.