by Peter Orner
“What is it, Phil?”
“Visualize this: Marina City, opposite apartments. Jane Byrne—in the buff, she’s only got on her heels—standing on her West Tower balcony. Jay McMullen’s on his balcony in the East Tower. And he’s watching her with binoculars while she puts on a little show. I heard it from a guy in the Corporation Council’s office. Apparently, these two do this all the time.”
“I love it,” Miriam said.
Byrne and her husband-to-be, the grizzled ex-reporter, McMullen. Those two unbeautifuls on their respective balconies, in the cold, checking each other out with binoculars. By then they’d both been knocked around enough, not a sight to see for most people, but what a thrill it must have been for them. Like two grunts poking out of their foxholes on Christmas morning. Luxury apartments, but that didn’t make a Democratic primary battle any less the blood sport of chattering gladiators. Brothers killing brothers. But they were going to be in this thing to win. Together they’d conquer that simp Michael Bilandic—or die. They were the Romeo and Juliet of municipal government. The Bonnie and Clyde of Streets and Sanitation. Jay once said he’d slept with every girl in City Hall. He’d roll over in the morning and get a scoop. So tell me, baby, is Sewers Eddie Quigley on the take or what? But now even McMullen’s going to behave. Because he’s in love with the next mayor of Chicago…
Remember Jane Byrne? Fighting Jane, Mike Royko called her Mayor Bossy. She ran against the Democratic machine and squashed it, the whole goddamned machine. The machine that gave birth to her, the machine—what was left of it—that she re-embraced practically the day after she sent Bilandic, that seat warmer, packing. First you beat something up, then you make it all yours. Winning was one thing, running this city another. So long, you reformers, take your Goody Two-shoes and run, Marty Oberman! Operator, get me Alderman Vrdolyak on the phone, and quick—
She couldn’t be bought off. That wasn’t the problem. Jane Byrne loved power, the pure idea of it, not what you did with it. And what she did with it was tell people off. Oh, how gloriously did Jane Byrne tell people off. Bless her, nobody had done it that well since Big Bill Thompson threatened to thump the King of England on the snoot. She told off Jimmy Carter. She told off Princess Margaret when she came to visit and tried to put on airs. She told off the firefighters of Chicago. She even told off the old man’s son, Richie. The old man had taught her about timing, and in the end that’s what was so off. She punched and she punched, and finally the only person she hit was herself. And when she aimed at her foot, it was Jay McMullen who pulled the trigger. But of all the scraps of what’s been long forgotten, there’s this: One night Philip came home and told his wife Miriam a story. They’d always have politics. Leo and Popper reconnoitering, standing outside the kitchen, ears to the swinging door, listened to her laugh.
“Good for her,” Miriam said. “I can see them.”
Just the two of them against the crowded, polluted night. Jane does a little come-hither dance in her famous white heels. Stay there, Jay. Don’t move. Stay right there and watch me.
CHAIN O’LAKES
Bernice, Seymour, Leo, and Alexander. Four Poppers in a boat. Chain O’Lakes, Fox Lake, Illinois vacation wonderland. Leo brought 25-pound dumbbells with him and sat in the middle of the boat and did curls. Seymour manned the helm in fatigues, a militarized Buddha revving the outboard.
Bernice wore her mink coat.
“What are you all waiting for?” Seymour bellowed. “Cast! Why doesn’t anybody cast?”
Nothing else to do but fish, and so they fished. Leo held his rod in one hand and a dumbbell in the other, breathed, counted, exhaled—then felt his biceps for progress. The boat floated aimlessly. The laughter of the people in the RV park carried across the water. The grind of the trucks shifting gears on Route 41. By late afternoon nobody’d had a single bite. Seymour blamed environmentalists.
“Wouldn’t environmentalists mean there’d be more fish?” Leo said. “This place is so full of toxins, if there are any fish left, they’ve got thumbs.”
“You think you can solve everything with your government noodling? Cast! Cast!”
The sun faded away like a sad pink eye. Leo held his weight on his thigh. They shivered. The lake weeds waved beneath the surface of the water. Bernice made peanut-butter sandwiches on her knees. “I’m a woman in a mink making peanut-butter sandwiches,” she said. “Seymour, take a picture. I’m finally domesticated.”
Lazy sandwich in hand, Popper flicked a silver lure in the water. The line plunked. The tug was immediate, but at the same time halfhearted, a bite with resignation. It hardly bent the rod. At first Popper wanted to be alone with it for a while, to caress his bite in private. This clutch of life, my only own. But Seymour spotted it and leaned forward and said, quietly, as if the fish might overhear:
“Reel her in with all the fight in your very soul.”
Time passes, you swim, you spawn, sometimes you move around in schools, other times on your own, deloop, deloop, bop, bop, it’s all a murky blur. But it’s yours. You down there in your dark, the Chain O’Lakes the only home you’ve ever known, and then one day you take a bored little nip at something shiny. You don’t even think about it, you’re not even hungry at this time of day; it was just there, dangling in front of your mouth.
It was a four-inch-long yellow perch. It did not flop on the line, only made a couple of halfhearted twitches and went limp. “Avast,” Leo said under his breath as the little head peeped out of the water. “It’s the fucking white whale.”
Popper reeled and the fish swung out of the water toward him. He cradled it in his bare hand, its underbelly like sandpaper. He ripped the hook out of its mouth and looked closely into its mouth—a delicate little oval membrane of a mouth—before dropping it into the boat at his feet. The fish lay bleeding in the bilge water, gills panting slowly. A lone lidless pupil stared up at him. Maybe a minute passed. Everybody in the boat just watched.
It was Bernice who finally said, “Aren’t you forgetting something, Alexander?”
“What?”
“The rock, it’s under your seat.”
It wasn’t as if he’d never caught a fish before. Who knows? Maybe he was only mesmerized. Maybe he only wanted to watch it die slowly in the dirty puddle of water, gills silently working.
IN THE DRIVEWAY
Seymour was finally forced to sell. His company had been losing money for years. It wasn’t a big company, but it wasn’t a small one either, and it had made him rich, for a time, rich. The story of how it all unraveled is convoluted, and every time Popper used to ask about it, he’d get a different version. It had something to do with the fact that Seymour’s company (allegedly) began writing more insurance policies than they could possibly cover with their cash reserves. When business improved, went the rationale (allegedly), there would be more cash to cover the increase in policies…. Somehow the state got wind of it and was launching an investigation. In the meantime, a group of investors put an offer on the table and Seymour accepted. But to demonstrate his good faith, he then turned around and invested all his proceeds from the sale back into minority stock. When the price fell after the state went public with the investigation, Seymour didn’t sell. The price kept falling. Seymour, who’d put his soul into that company, who’d built it up from a two-man storefront office on Garfield Boulevard (Popper is still chiseled above the doorway of that building, now a hair salon), stood by. He held on and he held on. Philip begged him not to be a fool, to sell off while there was still something left.
Father and son had it out in front of the house on Sylvester Place.
Seymour was washing his Fleetwood. A man should always wash his own car, boys. You don’t need to import a Mexican to wash your car. It was eight o’clock in the morning. Philip, on his way to work, stopped at his father’s house.
“Don’t be a goddamn coot,” Philip said. “Your theoretical goodwill and your integrity don’t mean a thing to the stock price. Sell. Sell it all tomorro
w, and at least come out of it with your toenails.”
Seymour in an undershirt, his stomach wagging, wielded his hose. “What good are principles if they are so easily cashed? Do I not have honor? When the ship is sinking, do I leap?”
“You’re drowned already.”
“What do you know about loyalty? I am an honorable man.”
“Wasn’t Brutus also? And you’re lucky you’re not going to jail. You knew you weren’t holding enough in reserve. The only reason they’ve stopped chasing you is you’ve got nothing left to chase.”
“Are you impugning me?”
“Dad, at least think about Mother.”
“That woman hasn’t said boo to me in years.”
Father and son stood in the driveway and eyed each other over the hood of the car. Seymour laughed and wagged his hose, and the water cascaded down on the windshield, the light—pink, yellow, green—sharding in all directions.
“Dad,” Philip says. “Dad—”
HOLLIS
Philip and Miriam were at the Lyric Opera that night with Hal and Martha Rosencrantz. The boys were upstairs watching a TV movie about a blind man accused of murder. The blind man had white hair and pink eyes and looked to Popper as if he could have done the murder, though even he knew that the point of the movie was the fact that the blind man was a falsely accused innocent man.
Earlier, Hollis had said he felt a little sick and so had gone to bed early. During the blind man’s trial, where it was being shown that a blind man could commit murder as easily as the next guy, Leo decided they ought to take Hollis some tomato juice. Together, they went down to the kitchen. Leo poured the juice. Popper carried the glass with both hands, trying not to spill, and followed Leo down the basement stairs. The light was on in Hollis’s room, his door open. Hollis was on his back, half in bed, half on the floor. In his left hand he held a novel. The radio was on.
Popper dropped the tomato juice on the carpet.
One of the paramedics told Leo that Hollis was probably already gone when they found him. A heart attack so massive, he said, bringing him the V8 earlier wouldn’t have made any difference.
“Who was he?” the paramedic asked.
His Alabama brothers drove up for the funeral. Three men who looked much like Hollis. What did they see when they saw the Poppers? Little Alexander was still wearing that fucking sailor suit as his formal attire. He worried his face didn’t look sorry enough.
Hollis, I came dressed as a sailor to your funeral, and all I wanted was to sprint into your brother’s stomachs and bounce off. Your Cleveland daughter didn’t show up. My mother wept. She said, We didn’t know you. Four days a week you lived in our house and still we didn’t—What book was in your hand? The last sentence you read said what?
Hollis Osgood is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Skokie, Illinois. One of his brothers said it was all right. Isn’t he from here now, anyway? He moved up here for the wages. He lies across the road from the Popper family plot, in a narrow rim of grass along the outer fence, bordering Gross Point Road. There is no birth date, no death date.
THE SULPHUROUS PIT
The Rosencrantzes present The Tragedy of King Lear… With sock puppets! Jacob played the King. Leah played all the daughters, but was least convincing as the nice one. Eli played everybody else and directed and collected the tickets, 75 cents per bumpkin; Leo shelled it out for both of them.
And Lear wailed:
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends’;
There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption, fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!
The story has always been told that it was the second pah! that sent Popper over. And nothing Leo whispered could make him stop bawling. “Have some pride, Alex. You want to confirm everything these smuggers already think about us? That we’re so far beneath them we can’t even sit through Shakespeare?”
They stopped the show.
From behind the curtain, a voice asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Listen,” Leo said, “he doesn’t give a shit about your Punch and Judy show. Someone died.”
“Who?”
“Our houseman.”
“Your who?”
Jacob, King Lear drooping from his hand, came out from behind the bedsheet and sat down beside Popper.
In his gravely Lear voice he asked, “Your first raw wound, you whoreson dog?”
Popper went on screeching.
“Inconsolable? And so green in revolutions of the sun? ’Tis an unlikely torrent in such an early knave.”
Popper leapt up and bit him in the leg.
Jacob tossed the puppet on the carpet and said in his ordinary voice, Popper’s teeth still clinging to his shin, “It’s a wrap, everybody. Seems to me the kid gets the play.”
Morning Orders
March 2, 1945
Follow Plan of Day
0450 Wake duty cooks
0620 Reveille
0635 Chow down. Wake officers.
S. Popper
Exec. Off.
Note to O.O.D. Keep the helmsman alert and on course. No lights are expected tonight—but call me if any are seen.
SP
8
THE DISINFECTANT POOL
March 28, 1945
This morning at 0530 a report came in that there was an unidentified ship astern of us about four miles closing rapidly—Well, the old heart jumped a little, and I looked to see if my life jacket was in order—I went up to the bridge, where the captain was already—and we started peering through the darkness with glasses—We waited—Finally a touch of gray came into the sky, and then I picked up a shadow in my glasses and so did the captain—What an eerie sight—Just a lot of gray swirling mists and then a long shadow that comes and goes until you’re not sure whether you see it or not—Now that it’s lights-out, it’s all forgotten—How are you feeling, angel? And how are the children? How is darling Esther? I miss her so much it’s just like a physical pain—
THE BASEMENT STAIRS
Once more into the house on Sylvester Place, open the basement door. Go halfway down the basement stairs and stop. The huge framed collage Bernice made for Seymour on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Newspaper clippings, postcards, war dispatches, a Western Union telegram:
12/27/45
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM YOKOHAMA WAR NOT CAKE ONLY EATABLE CAKE YOU—SEYMOUR
In the center of it all, a photograph of Seymour in his captain’s uniform. Below him two quotes:
In the naval service, there are customs and usages that are peculiar to the personnel serving in the Navy. The origin of many of these is obscure, but they have the power of full authority and are conscientiously observed.
And: My country—may she always be right, but right or wrong—my country.
Ringing Seymour’s head like a halo are snapshot cutouts of the heads of his loyal crew, his family.
And along the right margin of the collage: DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP!!!
Another story of that house. It has to do with Popper’s Aunt Esther, Philip’s sister. In the late 1970s, Esther divorced her husband Lloyd and moved back home with Bernice and Seymour. Sometime during her first year back home she scratched out her ex-husband’s face on Seymour’s birthday collage. She also scratched out herself. Maybe it was the fact that his aunt and ex-uncle’s face were part of a larger whole that made their obliteration so fascinating. Sometimes, when Popper was over at Sylvester Place, he’d go down there and look at the collage. The rest of them, all smiling patriotically around Seymour’s bulbous head. There was something about the proximity of Popper’s own intact face to Esther and Lloyd’s scratched-out faces that intrigued him. It was as if he’d survived the onslaught. Because Esther had scratched herself and Lloyd out hard. She’d really hacked that collage.
<
br /> Of course she had her reasons, good ones. Who could blame her for not wanting to look at her face and his face every time she went up and down the basement stairs?
One late summer day he’d been heading for the basement when he paused and looked for a while at the collage. For some reason he decided to take the frame down in order to inspect the wall behind it. His grandmother opened the door and stood at the top of the stairs. Behind her, the kitchen window and the yellow August light. She breathed a sigh, held it in her shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just looking at the hole.”
“What hole?”
“The hole she made in the wall when she scratched out the faces.”
“What are you talking about?”
She was lying. Everyone had seen it and pretended they hadn’t. The basement stairs were well traveled. The laundry was down there, and so was the Ping-Pong table, as well as the filing cabinets full of the letters Seymour wrote Bernice during the war. He once told Popper he wrote her a letter a day for the entire war.
Everybody paused to look at the birthday collage on their way up and down the basement stairs.
Bernice standing at the top of the stairs with the light behind her, almost like snow, Popper thought, outlining her still beautiful body—lying. His Aunt Esther was at work then. Through it all—the being back home, the hardly talking to Bernice and Seymour, the cutting herself off from her friends, stories about her circling around Highland Park and Chicago. Hear about it? At forty-odd something, Esther Popper moved back in with her parents. Through it all, she went to work in an office. But Esther, Esther Popper a receptionist? All the hopes Bernice had for her. At fifteen she was a better ballerina than I ever was. And, my God, so smart, she could have been anything at all. Aren’t our expectations a form of love also?