by Peter Orner
“C-3? Anybody got C-3?”
LEO AND ALEXANDER
Okay. Mayor Daley trivia. Ready? Concentrate now, Alexanderplatz. True or false? His Honor’s dentist has only one arm.
Please get out of my life. I don’t care. I will never care. As long as I live, I will never care—
CLAUDETTE AND SABINE
Manny’s sisters, Manny’s sisters, Manny’s sisters, Manny’s sisters, Manny’s sisters, Manny’s sisters, Manny’s sisters—locked in the bathroom, Manny and Popper pummeling the door and the two of them in there laughing and then not laughing, getting down to whatever business they had going in there. (Even now Popper can only imagine, he can’t even imagine. He imagines.) Manny tried to pick the lock with a safety pin, no dice. They waited in the dark hall of that ghost-ridden mansion, a hall lined with suitcases. Manny’s family always on the verge of moving away. That massive, peculiar non-home was supposed to be only temporary. We’re packed and ready to go, Manny’s mother would say. Manny’s mother, her tired eyes. Popper rarely saw her. She worked as a private nurse seven days a week, left early, came home late—nonetheless she was one of the few people in Popper’s early life who always seemed genuinely happy to see him. She’d smile through her exhaustion.
“Now, Alexander, please thank your parents for allowing you to come and see us.” Allowing me? I’m on the run, Mrs. Laveneaux. Maybe for this reason he was afraid to look her in the face.
Once, Popper overheard her through the wall telling Manny’s father, an even less-seen man who worked even longer hours: “Michael, I don’t want to live in a shipwreck, I want to live in a house.”
On the other side of the wall, Popper waited for a response, but Manny’s father didn’t answer. Or maybe he did answer, Popper just didn’t hear him. Show me a house, Phelicia, that isn’t a shipwreck, one way or another.
The long driveway that went from the bottom of Ravine Drive up to the top of the bluff where the house sat on the edge. The view of the lake from the massive living room windows, no trees in the way.
“Do you know how much a view like this costs?” Popper once asked Manny.
“Yes,” Manny said. “More than you even think.”
Think of the bees in the attic. The stacks of storm windows in the basement they spent one afternoon smashing with their moon boots. Remember the back staircase that led to a bricked-in doorway. Remember the frames without pictures on the walls of the living room. Temporary; but for years the Laveneaux family stayed. Only Manny’s sisters ever seemed content there, as if they knew they were only biding their time, that this bizarre old place was as good as any other, and that they’d be long gone soon enough.
Manny and Popper waiting outside in the hall with those suitcases and the glowing orange space heater.
“What if we need to take a piss?” Manny asked the door. “This is the only bathroom that works in the whole place.”
“Piss in the lake.” Claudette or Sabine?
February 16, 1945
Oh baby, I feel like a dishrag—to top it off, I’ve got some kind of fungus growth on my ass—Don’t laugh, it itches like hell—The minute I get a little warm it feels like I’m sitting on a thousand tiny nettles—I spend half my day rubbing against an upright like some kind of insane cat—Aside from this, I’m getting very fat—
GREAT-GRANDMOTHER WASSERKRUEG
Leo said Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg was buried alive in the paneling of the cedar closet of the house on Sylvester Place, the closet where Seymour kept his old naval uniforms and enough Hudson Bay blankets to keep the French Army warm in Russia. She wasn’t even dead. Seymour’s mother would never die. She still lived in the city, on the seventeenth floor of a residential hotel on South Lake Shore Drive called the Flamingo, and survived on yogurt and wrath. Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg, née Popper née Katzinger, the queen mother, a tormented old woman with fluffed Martin Van Buren sideburns.
After the death of her first husband, Seymour’s father, she married a man named Wasserkrueg, a man with older money and a lot more of it. He died soon after, but she wore her new name like a badge that separated her from the riffraff of the rest of the family. It was August. Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg sat beneath many shawls in a high chair with wings amid the clutter and dust. The apartment was hot and sticky. Every available surface was covered with a doily, a web of decrepit lace. Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg had dull but perpetually white hair that looked as if it had been shellacked. Seymour doted on her, offered her Lipton’s and Fannie May nonpareils and Canada Dry, and Popper thought, I’m on another planet where Seymour’s the maid. Her in that big chair. Her little socked feet. Her voice was hoarse and she swallowed two or three times between every word. For the occasion, Popper wore his sailor suit. Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg asked him where he lived. I live at home. Where else would I live? But for some reason he knew she was asking for the exact address. So he told her 105 Riparian Lane, Highland Park, Illinois, 60035. She closed her eyes for a while, but didn’t go to sleep. Her tongue moved under her lips.
“What!”
“Did you forget to insert your ear trumpets, Mother?”
Popper repeated it: “Number 105 Riparian Lane, Highland Park, Illinois, 60035.”
She opened her eyes and beckoned him. He got up off the ottoman and took a tiny step forward. Closer, child. Closer. He bumped up against her cushiony lap and did his best to hug her. She smelled like the fug of the rotting squirrel his mother ran over, the one nobody moved from the end of the driveway. Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg didn’t hug back; she only watched him, watched him long, too long, her eyes buried deep in the gulch of her face. They say when she was younger she was ravishing, so ravishing that being ravishing was the only thing she ever was. And they say that since Great-grandfather Leopold never really thrived—he sold insurance on Garfield Boulevard, the family lived above the office—all that ravishing was wasted on a poorish man. Leopold died in the fifties. Everybody thought she’d follow him soon to the grave. Instead, she found Mr. Wasserkrueg and moved from four and a half rooms on Garfield Boulevard to South Lake Shore Drive.
Above her head, to mark the alcove, two babies, naked cherubs, held up the molding.
A blast of hot breath pelted Popper in the eyes.
“And how do you like number 105 Riparian Lane, Highland Park?”
Before he could say anything, she began to shake with a furious, quiet laughter.
Then, still looking straight at him, Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg said, “What’s this boy’s name?”
“Mother, you know his name is Alexander.”
“After who? Alexander the Great? Hamilton? Graham Bell? That halfwit Haig? Who?”
“Nobody,” Popper said. “I think nobody.”
“And why the get-up, Seymour?”
“He’s going to go to Annapolis. This boy’s going to be an admiral.”
She shook one withered hand loose from the folds of her blanket and, with a backward wave, dismissed him as if scattering flies. “Go away, Seymour. And take Little Lord Fauntleroy with you. Say hello to your chorus girl.”
His grandfather began to plead, to blubber. “Ballet dancer, Mother, you know Bernice is a ballet dancer.”
Seymour. His titanic head round as a plate, his colossal feet. “And this is your great-grandson, see how he loves you. Look at him, Mother. Look at him.”
Loves me? She said it so soft no words actually came out. Then she opened her mouth as if to laugh, but instantly fell asleep. Popper could tell by the way her nose whistled. For a moment, she woke up. “Where are my cats, Seymour?”
“All your cats died, Mother.”
In the elevator, Seymour loosened his tie and said, Why don’t we go to the Cape Cod Room and have some shrimp cocktails and ketchup. When they reached the lobby, he got out of the elevator, but his grandfather didn’t. The doors closed. He waited there in the lobby in his sailor suit and white sailor hat and watched the numbers rise. They stopped at the seventeen
th floor. He pushed the down button and held his finger there. After a while the elevator came back and opened empty.
LOG CABIN LADY
For decades the oldest structure in Highland Park was used as a storage shed on the golf course at Migweth* Country Club (founded 1860, no blacks, no Jews, Mexicans work in the kitchen).
In 1976, in honor of the bicentennial, the storage shed was loaded onto a flatbed truck, driven uptown, dropped on the lawn between City Hall and the library, and declared a treasure of historic preservation: the Stupey Log Cabin.
Miriam was hired to play Mrs. Stupey, otherwise known as the Log Cabin Lady. From April to October she stood—Tuesdays and Fridays, 10 to 4—in the cabin doorway dressed like a pioneer housewife. She didn’t get many visitors. Highland Park, like the great city that gave birth to it, does not dwell on the past. If the city council wants to plop a log cabin in the center of town, what of it? Occasionally school groups would come by, but mostly, if it was anybody, it was one of the lonely wanderers from the mental health center on Laurel Avenue. They came in sympathy. They knew what it was like to be ignored in broad daylight. One man in particular, Billy, was the most frequent visitor. He was hunchbacked and walked around Highland Park as if heading down a full-force gale, a silently groaning man, and Miriam would give him the tour. She would tell Billy about the hardship of life on the prairie, about the long foodless winters and humid summers. The tour didn’t last long; the cabin was small, the history scripted. My simple, honest house was built in 1847 of hand-hewn virgin white oak timbers cut by my husband… Inside, a butter churn, a loom, a candlemaker, and a wood-burning stove. Each was the subject of a brief demonstration, except for the wood-burning stove, which was left to the imagination due to fire regulations. The dirt floor constantly needed raking. “The work those women did,” she would say. “It really is inspiring to think about.” Miriam in her bonnet and layers and layers of petticoats and white nurse’s shoes she wore because she wasn’t allowed to sit on the period furniture. Popper and Manny Laveneaux would ride over on their bikes and wave. “Even when she’s Amish,” Manny said, “your mom’s a babe.”
At cocktail parties when people asked her what she did, Miriam would say, At the moment, I’m an actress.
Mrs. Stupey’s husband, Mr. Stupey, was the local blacksmith, a character the town didn’t have enough in the budget to hire. To prove his existence, Miriam would demonstrate an iron pot he’d made at his forge just up the road, where Larson’s Stationery is now. Her talk was written by a historical society subcommittee and was patriotic, as befitted the bicentennial, full of struggle and rugged endurance. Also, it included recipes for snap beans and onion butter and molasses muffins. And the fact that Abe Lincoln himself, who grew up in a cabin not unlike this one, enjoyed fried apple and salt pork for breakfast. Miriam would give the talk in character, but when Billy came by she’d go off-script and tell him about Indians, which were explicitly not part of the talk except around Thanksgiving. She’d say that most of them from around these parts are friendly but some of the Potawatomi don’t exactly come in peace and so it is true, Billy, that there are days and nights when Mr. Stupey and myself live in fear of rape and pillage. Nights we lie awake just waiting. And yet, Miriam would ask Billy, who’d be watching her with his busy eyes, what can we expect? I mean ask yourself, and this isn’t a rhetorical question, whose land is this? I’m not saying Mr. Stupey and I deserve to be scalped and tortured and murdered, oh no, we are good people, but this doesn’t mean we don’t do things like loot and plunder land that isn’t ours and pretend we didn’t. We do a lot of pretending, don’t we, Billy? Billy listening, his eyes going and going, his out-front head, his big sad ears, his shirt with all the missing buttons. (He was run over by a drunk, no joke, named Saul Paradise in 1980.) But don’t shed any tears for us, ye people of future generations. I speak for Mr. Stupey also. Settling the West has its price and I’m not going to stand here and complain. Look at what we’ve built. Any questions, Billy? Comments? Concerns? Things of this nature? Oh, Billy, you’re such a good odd bird.
February 20, 1945
Gosh, now that’s more like it—I was a little surprised and tickled too at the way you’ve developed a real vehemence for the Germans and Japs—you’re really fightin’ mad—and you’re right too—You’re giving me such strength now—You’re finally giving me what I want—Some of the things you wrote really make me proud of you—Perhaps you don’t know it, but you’re developing—Beanie, your mind is growing—
THE HUNTERS
They are Jewish hunters in northern Illinois, and the birds come out and party. Even Hollis, even with his experience in the Korean Emergency, wasn’t a very good shot. They’d wear big yellow safety goggles and fondle their guns and trudge the frozen November fields. Philip had given the boys a choice: spend Sunday at Sunday school at their Reform Reform temple, Lakeside Synagogue—learning Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Cherokee, and, periodically, even Jewish precepts—or head up to the North Country to become a man.
… The four of them, a platoon of meandering unkillers marching, silently marching, marching. The land never rose in their eyes, but to call the prairie flat isn’t to know it with your feet. To your feet the November fields are fathomless—the more you walk, the more you never get anywhere. Above: the great mayonnaise sky. Popper liked to put his fingers in the little bullet holders of his hunting coat and walk with his eyes closed. But those hunt-club fields were so stocked with game that even hunting with a Lhasa apso, they couldn’t avoid some action. Sir Edmund, in spite of his pampered backyard life, turned out to be pretty good at flushing birds. (Even one of the old regulars at the hunt club, a one-eyed man named Ky, said of Sir Edmund, “Now, that little hound has talent.”) Pheasants aren’t very hard to shoot. First, there’s that hysterical nuthouse cackling. And then the running start, followed by a slow rise, like a fat, wide-bodied plane taking off. Occasionally, with their volley of shots, somebody would hit a bird. Sir Edmund would retrieve the body. It was Popper’s job to ferry the deceased, and he liked that part. He was a backward kangaroo, the pheasant against his back, warm, bleeding, heavy with the puttylike inertness of the newly murdered. Every third field or so there was a rack and a row of nails. Birds would be hanging there like spent rags, their eyes as if pried open. Later, a man would come in a pickup and throw the birds into the bed of the truck and drive them to the lodge, where they’d be made into pheasant burgers, pheasant stew, pheasant casserole, and frozen pheasant to go. So he would have to give up his bleeding child and squeeze another little neck between the nails. And Philip would say, with near-reverence, These birds were raised to be killed, so we’re only doing our part, playing our role in nature’s great cycle of life and death and food on the table. Besides, if we don’t shoot them, the next barbarian will, and then what? Isn’t that right, Hollis?
COMISKEY
Hollis took Popper and Manny to a Sox game at old Comiskey. They sat in the left-field bleachers. When he was out of the domain of 105 Riparian, Hollis was a lot quieter. He left all his booming in the house. At Comiskey, with all that razzing, bellowing, spitting, guzzling, Hollis mostly watched the pigeons stab the popcorn at his feet. Popper and Manny gaped at the girls strutting up and down the bleacher steps. A broiling summer night in Chicago and Comiskey’s bleachers were a scantily clad place. Flesh, beer guts, and tits all over. Manny whispered, Screw Wrigley Field, this is life. These were the Bill Veeck years of the exploding pinwheel scoreboard, and when Jorge Orta hit one out in the sixth, the fireworks started going off. Popper and Manny went nuts because everybody else was going nuts. Hollis stood up also, but refused to hoot or yahoo. He sat down long before anybody else.
Hollis bought them more hot dogs and doughy pretzels than they knew what to do with. Popper and Manny bopped each other on the head with their churros.
Think of the urinals, those giant metal troughs, the sound like pounding rain. And what the light was like at Comiskey, not a total blinding brig
htness like you see today. The light at Comiskey was spotty. There were always bulbs that needed to be replaced. The bleachers lived in blue darkness. If you dropped a quarter under your seat, you’d have to grope around as if you were at the movies. Amazing some of the things he and Manny found. A half-eaten candy bar with a label they didn’t recognize. A petrified roach. From within that darkness, Popper watched the light. Dust particles were visible in the streams that separated the bleachers from the rest of the park like a shroud.
Hollis sat beside them without speaking, his eyes not on the batter or the pitcher but the second baseman. He didn’t say anything. His face said it. He loved only the quiet of the game. All the yelling and screaming had nothing to do with it. A barely foul ball, a check swing, a pick-off move—these things. It was about possibility, not fruition. Not the false pizzazz but the shush between innings. If something happens, it goes from dream to gone. Don’t you people know this?
They tore Comiskey down. In this city we tear everything down, eventually.
After the game Hollis commented on the score out of obligation, Sox 3, Cleveland 5, the dirty white colossus rising behind them as they walked across the parking lot. He didn’t mention current players’ names. Jorge Orta was nobody to him. The only player he mentioned was Swede Risberg from 1919. “If Risberg and the rest of them had only been paid a fair wage,” Hollis said, “they’d never have even been tempted by the gamblers in the first place. Purity of the game? You boys think Charlie Comiskey himself ever cared about the purity of the game?”
They lost Miriam’s car in the vast parking lot. For an hour the three of them wandered row after row. Eventually Manny found it. He climbed on top of the car and called out to them, “I’m on the Bug!”