Love and Shame and Love

by Peter Orner

  Philip slowly lifts his eyes off his plate.

  “Can you believe this? An innocent man minding his own business in his own driveway. Sid called me this morning. Said he needed paper money. Small amounts. Said my boy’s in a real stink this time. I said I’d talk to you. You know I’ll give what I can, but you know how things are right now.”

  “Sid called you?”

  “When a man’s in trouble, a man’s in trouble. Who’s Sid going to call, Marlon Brando?”

  “Why not?”

  “Friends is friends, Phil. Sid will pay it back with five percent interest.”

  Philip leans backward in his chair so that for a moment he’s balancing on two legs. He remains up there for a moment, a cowboy on a rearing upholstered steed, before thumping back to the carpet.

  “Wait a second,” he says. “Who’d want Melvie?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “You think I’m kidding?”

  “Phil.”

  Because for the past twenty-six years, Philip Popper has toiled in the little shadow of Sid Kaufman’s puny son, Melvie. Born on third base, halfway to home. With a famous father, doors don’t open, they were never closed in the first place. Come on in, Melvie. Here’s a job. (What does Melvie do again, manage night-clubs?) Here’s a house on the lake. Here’s a wife. North Shore perfection incarnate, Rona Grubner.

  Philip at Melvie’s wedding at the old Moraine Hotel congratulating the blissful couple, grazing Rona Grubner’s scrumptious cheeks with his own dry lips.

  It isn’t like Philip never had any help. He did. If it hadn’t been for Jake Arvey, he might be fixing speeding tickets for a living. But now he hustles. Every day, every hour, he hustles. Melvie never had to lift a pinkie and he doesn’t even know it.

  “What I’d really like to know,” Philip says, “is who nabbed him. Now, there’s an outfit I’d invest some real capital—”

  “A man’s been kidnapped. And you—”

  The room goes silent as forks clatter to plates and men of business and law turn to watch. Seymour Popper can’t be the only one at the Standard Club who knows. By eleven o’clock that morning, Sid had phoned at least twenty potentials trying to raise the money. But he’d also begged each of them to keep the thing under wraps. Who knows what these looney tunes are capable of, and you know my Melvin’s no King Kong. Judge Abe Lincoln Marovitz is only a couple of tables away. And isn’t that Pickard from the Harris Bank at the corner table beneath the china cabinet? For Christ’s sake, I’m even more ruined than I already am.

  Philip looks past his father and stares out the window at South Wacker Drive. He sniffs his drink before gulping it down in a single swoon. He finishes off the last of his creamed spinach.

  “What do you need?”

  “Fifteen grand in small bills by tomorrow morning.”

  Melvie escaped that afternoon from the basement of a house on Cicero Avenue, out by Midway Airport. Typical of Melvie Kaufman’s luck—to get nabbed by a couple of novices. They stripped him down to his boxer shorts and locked him in a bathroom with a window. Then the goofs went out for a few beers to celebrate how easy it was. So many years of night shifts, morning shifts, afternoon shifts, and all you had to do was pluck a famous man’s kid out of his driveway. An easy couple hundred thousand in cash. Tiptoe through the tulips, fellas. The next round’s on us! Philip’s still haunted by the image of Melvie Kaufman scooting down the block in his underwear. The headline: COLUMNIST’S SON IN MASTERFUL ESCAPE, KIDNAPPERS NABBED IN TAVERN. Ever since, Philip has wondered if there isn’t more to it, if luck itself isn’t part of some grand design and you either opened yourself up to it or you closed yourself off. What’s the angle? That’s what he’s always wanted to know.

  At the moment though, it being still lunchtime, Melvie is still kidnapped. “Maybe they’ll tie a brick—” Philip begins to say but there’s no time left to say around his neck and dump him in the Calumet—because time congeals in that dining room with the long tall windows and the red-and-white-striped mints in a bowl by the elevator and Paulo, the weary headwaiter in his green coat with the black-and-gold-striped sleeves who grinned with his teeth once a year on Thanksgiving. Seymour lunges across the table, elbows in a puddle of Worcestershire sauce, tablecloth scrunching, glasses crashing.

  FROM THE NAVAL LIBRARY OF SEYMOUR POPPER

  Silence is the first requisite of discipline on the well-drilled ship. Unnecessary noise of any kind makes confusion. Those in authority should be the only ones whose voices should be heard. During emergency drills, every man must go to his station at once on the double. If it so happens that a man is assigned no specific duties, he shall fall into his quarters and keep silent.

  —Bluejackets Manual (1940), page 216

  IN THE GARAGE

  He’d go out to the garage and crawl under Miriam’s Bug. He’d stick his nose into the rust and breathe. In the garage, with the winter-wrinkled boots, the ski poles, the deflated basketballs, the shovels, the spindly-fingered rakes, the vague stack of flat planks and 2 × 4s stacked in a pile in the corner. His father had a notion, for years, of building a rowboat from scratch. Why didn’t Popper take off out the back door and wander the ravine?

  Why didn’t he bike down to Manny’s? He and Manny Laveneaux would slog through the dead leaves and look for beer cans and license plates and corpses and gold. Or go alone to the place where the ravine ended. His favorite place, where the leaves met open beach, where the slow creek trickled out a small cement pipe, and he would sit on a pile of rocks and watch the water pool in a groove of sand, as if the last thing it wanted was to join the lake it had no choice but to join.

  Popper under his mother’s car, the motor oil–stained cement listening. The garage door clamped shut like a mouth. He rarely ever knew what it was about. He only picked up bits and pieces. Miriam had a few friends, sometimes she had lunch with them, sometimes these friends invited Philip and Miriam to parties. Philip didn’t like any of the friends. He called them little mincy suburban gossips. The friends, he’d spit, the friends, the friends. I grew up with that. It was all my parents cared about, the friends. Now look at them. Where are their fucking friends?

  Don’t shout at me.

  Shout at you? How can I shout at you if we never even speak, if you never even talk to me?

  Cold in the garage, and he liked it.

  MR. POMERANTZ

  He was an odd lonely fat man, and when he met them at the door the boys would have to kiss his ring. He’d hold out his hairy knuckles, and they had no choice but to bow and do it. He wasn’t the Pope. He was just someone who Miriam called “a real character.” A friend of Philip’s, he lived around the corner. He must be dead twenty-five years now. Philip said Mr. Pomerantz was a child survivor of Buchenwald and that they needed to be respectful and listen to his stories. Mr. Pomerantz talked; he talked incessantly from the moment they walked in his door.

  Leo said that Mr. Pomerantz survived because the Nazis didn’t believe that a starving Jew could be so fat. For the sake of novelty, they let him live. This, of course, didn’t stop them from murdering his mother with a pitchfork. Talking protects him, Leo said. Get it? Babbling stomps the memories.

  If anybody else spoke, usually Popper, to ask when they were going to leave, Mr. Pomerantz would suddenly be deaf, cup his ear and shout, what’s that? One of the elfin say something?

  The ring was huge and made of green glass. It was like kissing a bulbous insect eye. Mr. Pomerantz said it was the gift of a pasha. Popper remembers how smooth it felt against his lips. He remembers wondering how many other people over the years had been forced to smooch it. Like most lonely people, Mr. Pomerantz never dared look anyone in the eye. He considered himself jolly and entertaining, and he must have waited long hours so he could prove this. So he could regale, first with his exquisite ring, and then with stories of his remarkable life. If all else failed, there was always the car. Mr. Pomerantz owned a ’57 MG with a polished walnut steering wheel, a car Phi
lip loved.

  His stories must have been dull or overly complicated, because Popper remembers not a shred of them.

  He will never know why certain faces come back to him on certain days. He is looking out his office window at the few people roving up and down the street. The weekend Loop in winter. Bodies are scarce. Popper’s alone in the office. A lone fly walks slowly across the rim of his desk lamp. Lost? Wondering where all the other flies have gone? And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Tell thee what?

  Mr. Pomerantz lived in a house surrounded by trophies collected during the endlessly fascinating life he could not tell them enough about. One thing Popper does remember is that Mr. Pomerantz owned Stonewall Jackson’s saddle. His actual saddle, boys. Feel free to touch the leather. Feel free to touch everything here. This isn’t a museum! This is my life! Touch it! Touch away!

  The man sits in his house as the noon sun holds steady and refuses to droop into afternoon. He doesn’t read one of his thousands of books. Every day I buy ten books! Twenty books! Thirty books! Because he’s long since learned that words on a page aren’t much of an audience. Words on a page can’t be wowed. Popper hears his sighlike farts. Mr. Pomerantz avoids mirrors. He waits for visitors. It’s a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1975. He worries Phil Popper and his boys won’t drop by today. He worries that all he needs to say will sink back down his throat and be lost for good. One day, a weekday, he goes out to the garage, stuffs himself in the front seat of the MG, and turns on the little engine.

  He wasn’t the only one in their neighborhood to do it this way. There were two others. Mrs. Mueller, with her two kids watching cartoons in the house, and Mr. Bloom, the indicted stockbroker.

  IN THE GARDEN

  This lovely garden was once part of the grand estate of Robert C. Shafner, CEO of A. G. Becker. It included a home designed and built by Howard Van Doren Shaw in 1909. Acquired by the Park District in 1969, the home was demolished in 1986. The garden was restored by the Junior League in the spirit of historic preservation.

  —The Junior League of the North Shore

  All you people saw was ruin. What about other people’s historic preservation? Don’t you know that when you restore you also ruin? Now Popper doesn’t recognize the place at all. Ladies of the Junior League, would you put this in your annals?

  Affidavit of Alexander Popper, Serial Nostalgist (JD, John Marshall, ’99):

  In the State of Illinois, County of Cook, Alexander Popper, being duly sworn, deposes and says that he is of full cognizance and generally sound mind and that he remembers this: That he always heard, from his father, that Mr. Shafner was a very rich guy back in the day, and that, apparently, he died without heirs, or they’d all gone to greener pastures, or Palm Beach, or they just simply weren’t interested in granddaddy’s old falling-down place on the bluffs of Lake Michigan. So the house and the property, arguably the most beautiful property in the City of Highland Park, was given to the Park District, which at the time did not have the resources to knock it down. Consequently, the place was condemned, but one portion of the mansion remained habitable, and so the Park District allowed its chief of maintenance, a man named Emmanuel Laveneaux, originally from Haiti, an engineer chased out of the country by Papa Doc, to live there with his family. Whereupon Laveneaux’s oldest son, Manny Jr., made a friend, Alexander Popper, the affiant. In fact, they were each other’s first friend. For a number of years, Manny was the affiant’s only friend. A considerable amount of the affiant’s childhood was spent, as his own home wasn’t what one might define as especially happy, in Manny’s house, that white colossus rising above the lake, with boards on the windows, potholes in the floor, and bats in the attic. To the affiant, there was no more remarkable place on earth. Behind the house were the remains of Mrs. Shafner’s formal garden, a bizarre tangle, a maze of vegetation, and Manny and the affiant and Manny’s twin sisters used to play a game Manny made up—Manny always created their games—called Mr. Shafner’s Gone Psycho, in the overgrown brambles, amid the killer thorns and giant milkweed stalks and Mrs. Shafner’s hibiscus gone amuck. Manny would take a rusted pitchfork out of the round and crumbling shed (now annoyingly, lovingly restored, also) and chase his sisters and the affiant around that lunatic forest, and the sisters would shriek, because Manny always went after them first. That was Manny’s deal with the affiant. It was boys against girls, even though there could be only one insane Mr. Shafner. Manny’s sisters: Claudette had a birthmark on her head like a small caterpillar; Sabine wore her hair as short as Manny did. Still, to the affiant, the sisters were hard to tell apart because they shrieked the same way, laughed the same way, ran through the garden the same way, the milkweed stalks bursting, spermy milk oozing—ran the same way, with their heads thrown back and their arms spread wide. They wore old sundresses of their mother’s, and those dresses sometimes tore on the sharp horny thorns, and the affiant would spy on them from his foxhole at the bottom of one of Mrs. Shafner’s dead frog ponds. He’d watch Manny’s sisters in their ripped dresses as Manny raged—I tell you once, I tell you a thousand times—no Jews or Negroes on my property!

  But, ladies of the Junior League, listen, it was almost as if Manny Laveneaux and the affiant were playing one game and the sisters another, because when Manny did catch one of them and threaten to skewer her head like a melon, she’d—either Claudette or Sabine—only chew her gum and laugh in his face like she knew something Manny and the affiant didn’t know, would never know, that you can’t catch what isn’t catchable, and that even the memory of a girl in a ripped sundress will always be just out of grasp (the affiant still watching from his foxhole, spermy milkweed hands).

  Dead Alewives

  6

  STOWAWAYS

  CARY AVENUE BEACH

  That year the alewives began washing up on the shores of the lake and their stench rose from the beaches so that even when you couldn’t smell them anymore they stank up your memory. Newly dead, they were a silvery blue. In the sun they looked like hundreds of mirrors. They yellowed as they dried up. And the smell changed, too, from freshly dead to something slightly less pungent but more permanent. A sweet pickled rot. Alewives swim in schools. They die together, as it should be. That year the tide delivered them up by the bucketful. One beach needed a dump truck to haul them away. He thinks of their small open mouths. What kind of god allows for the massacre of fish that even fishermen spare? Non-indigenous to Lake Michigan. The newspapers called them a nuisance fish, in life and in death. They rode in on ships from the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Popper liked the idea of fish as stowaways. He’d go down to Cary Avenue after school and take his shoes off and walk on them, crack the thin bones of their backs.

  IN THE BASEMENT

  If Hollis was needed, Hollis was there. If Hollis was called for and not needed, he would make that judgment and stay in the basement. Call him all you want, he won’t answer. He’d retreat below at about 9:30, to his reading and his whiskey, and would only re-emerge on deck, as he called upstairs, before everybody was awake the next morning. When she was through with the dishes—Miriam always insisted on doing the dishes—some nights she’d go down to the basement and sit with him for a while. He’d pour her a drink and the two would sit in silence in front of the pale light of the silent TV. Johnny Carson’s guffaw never reached them. Neither said much. She’d ask about his daughter. He had some Polaroids of her. His daughter was twelve in the pictures, but Hollis said she’d be sixteen by now, in Cleveland. Hollis never asked Miriam why she stayed. He wasn’t one to underestimate the power of a roof, any roof.

  February 10, 1944

  Please tell me you’re not still bitter—that you’re waiting for me with the openest of arms—that you really want to find happiness with me—You know, sweetheart, I was telling the men the other day you were the most luscious piece in Sigma Delta Tau, and how no one could hold a candle to you—especially in the shadow dance—My goodness, you were so gorgeous then—and even then you showed promise of dev
eloping into the delightfully voluptuous creature that you have since become—

  38 SYLVESTER PLACE

  Bingo in the den at Bernice and Seymour’s. The bison-sized Zenith in the corner, the single bay window, the one tall tree in the yard, the rusty swingless swing set. Seymour throned on his La-Z-Boy with the footrest extended, calling out letters like a crazed auctioneer: B-26? B-26? Who’s got it now? B-26! Going, going, gone! Between rounds he cranked the letters in the little metal hamster cage and discoursed on the history of bingo. You know it was illegal in the state of Illinois until 1967. Before that enlightened year, little old ladies in church basements across the land of Lincoln were akin to brave bootleggers in the age of Prohibition, blue-haired pioneers we should salute, for it was they who cleared the way for recognition of our inalienable right to gamble away our livelihoods…

  Passing through the den to drop off popcorn in a big bowl, Bernice said, “Seymour, call out a number already.”

  When she reappeared forty-five minutes later with store-bought cookies, Popper said, “Granbean, put a marker on your card. D-12 got called already.”

  Bernice smiled over her shoulder at him. “Alex dear, by now you should be old enough to know that it doesn’t matter if you put a marker on the letter or not.”

  “Stop making cameos, Beanie,” Seymour said. “It’s irritating. Either stay or go, would you?”

  “Don’t fuss, Seymour. I’m on my way out.” Bernice was always on her way out. To luncheon, to bridge, or to the ballet classes she taught three days a week back in the city for almost fifty years. Into her eighties, she was still teaching. Not luck, work.