by Peter Orner
But this daughter will never be ashamed. And she couldn’t give a damn what people said about her. Esther, who left a rich husband to stew in his own juice. Esther, who eats TV dinners in her old room and reads Middlemarch all night long.
Within three years, she will be dead of a cancer that struck so fast and so decisively it would have been merciful if it hadn’t been so terrifying.
Popper never knew her that well. Philip and Esther had never been close. Since the war, it was said. Brother and sister had been at odds with each other since as long ago as the war. Bernice, Philip would occasionally mutter, paid no attention to him from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day. It was always Esther, Esther, Esther.
After Esther’s death, Seymour and Bernice finally sold the house at 38 Sylvester Place. They moved into a small rented ranch house on the west side of the expressway, a place with yellow wall-to-wall indoor/outdoor carpeting and colossal toilets. Even though he was in hock to the tune of tens of thousands, Seymour still had to have certain things huge.
Bernice standing at the top of the basement stairs, her love for a daughter at its most fierce, and Popper down there holding that old collage, fingering the hole she made in the wall. Is it possible to have a single moment back? Why this one? Bernice and Popper watching each other? In the shambling house on Sylvester Place? Bernice at the top of the stairs, the August light? A sigh trapped in her shoulders?
“Alexander, put that idiot thing back on the wall where you found it.”
A BROTHER AND SISTER
No cathartic goodbye for these siblings. Toward the very end of her life, Esther refused to let Philip come by her hospital room. There’s a Saul Bellow story with a similar subject matter. A decades-long rift, a dying sister, an imploring brother. In “The Old System” the sister finally writes to the brother, All right already. You can come and say so long, but it will cost you a grand.
Esther, on the other hand, wasn’t interested in Philip’s money. Nor did he ever offer any. And she didn’t respond to the notes delivered to the hospital by Miriam. In spite of everything, you are still my sister and I am still your brother, Philip wrote. She didn’t crumple the letters up. She set them on the table, thanked Miriam for coming, and went on reading. The story pretty much ends there. At least the end of the story does. Of course, the ending wouldn’t have come about were it not for a lifetime’s worth of enmity. Why the hate, a brother and a sister? No one thing. Esther’s difficult personality. Philip’s difficult personality. And always the old explanation: Esther got all the attention. A simple lack of love between them feels like a better answer. But who can say? Popper remembers family dinners at 38 Sylvester Place after Esther moved back home. At that time, Bernice and Seymour were mostly silent. So was Miriam. It was all she could do to endure these Popper family dinners. Even Leo didn’t have much to say. Philip would dominate the conversation, holding forth (not because he had anything in particular to say either, but because somebody had to fill up all that quiet), until Esther, invariably, would throw her napkin down on her plate.
“Now, Esther, please,” Bernice would say.
She never bolted from the dining room. She’d slide back her chair slowly, as if in some odd way even she would never understand or acknowledge she didn’t want to part from her brother’s company now that he was finally silent and watching her.
YOU CAN’T SAY DALLAS
Eli played the President. Jacob was Jackie. Leah, naturally, Oswald. Leah Harvey Oswald. And because it had to do with politics—and if the uncultured Poppers knew about anything at all, they knew something about politics—the Rosencrantzes let the rabble in on it as footnotes. Leo doubled as both the Kennedy’s chauffeur and Texas governor John Connally. Popper was given a bonnet and told to play Connally’s wife, Nellie. A brief speaking part for the kid Jacob always called Señor Quietus, which meant, according to him, that Popper was a kind of holy mystic/idiot.
The game was mobile. They started at the corner of Fullerton and North Cleveland and moved gradually down Cleveland toward the townhouse. Leo welcomed the President and Mrs. Kennedy to Texas. He apologized for being the driver and the governor, but this being Texas, a man does like to drive. This was Leo’s own unscripted joke, and the Rosencrantzes, even Jacob, refused to laugh. Then Eli pucked out his chin and waved at the crowds. Jacob needled him. “Now, Jack, I won’t ask you again, please stop trying to stare up Nellie’s skirt. It’s not polite.” Jacob was always playing a different game than Eli. They moved slowly, but closer and closer, ominously closer, to Leah, who was standing in the upstairs balcony of the book depository with Hal’s hat stand mounted on her shoulder. Maybe Popper was too busy watching and listening to the others. Unlike all the other games, for some reason this game he liked. How they all moved so slowly, unnaturally, up the street. Parades are freakish things. To be watched, watched by thousands of rapturous, cheering people who only want to see a glimpse of your face, your actual face. And that’s it. Then you move on. And the people who lined the streets remember you later, talk about having seen you, for years. He got so caught up in it he forgot to say his one and only line, Nellie’s line. Kennedy was worried about Dallas. Why wouldn’t he have been? Even with Johnson vice president, Texas didn’t love Democrats. And the election wasn’t that far off. But they lined the streets and cheered and cheered, and Nellie Connally told him not to worry a thing about Dallas. The last words he heard before it all went dark or numb or whatever happens in your brain when you are shot point-blank in the head. Dazed and wandery, Popper bonked the line, and Leah had to stand there and wait for him to say it. Jacob congratulated him: See? Señor Quietus is a just and humble God. He lets a man live merely by remaining silent. But Eli ripped Popper’s bonnet off and shouted, “Say the line, dwarf!” And then, bonnetless, he did. Except he whispered it: “Oh, Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” and still Leah fired and fired her hat stand, and Eli fell, and Jacob fell on top of him, saying, I give bloody bloody kisses to my bloody bloody brother, and Eli belted Jacob in the stomach, and that was it, the game was done.
LEO DISCOURSING
But really, in some ways Bobby’s murder was actually the more mysterious of the two. Certainly any guy with the same first and last names intrigues. Was there ever a better assassin’s name than Sirhan Sirhan? No other name would have done. That was a big part of it. Also, his motives have never been very clear. Something to do with RFK’s position on Israel. The point is, watch your left flank, always. A shot can always come from that direction. Lee Harvey Oswald was, at one time, a Communist, I think, wasn’t he? Spent some time in Moscow? My point is that more often than not, you’re going to take a bullet from someone who should love you—but doesn’t. Booth and Lincoln both hated tyrants. They might have been allies in another life. Of course, there are always practical considerations. Garfield’s assassin? He never even has a name. He is always “a demented office-seeker.” All he wanted was a job, any job. Garfield could have made him a messenger and the guy would have put a picture of Garfield up on his mantel. Instead—bam. I guess what I’m saying is, never let your guard down. And where you think it’s safest, it never is. Are you even listening to me, Alexanderov? Do you ever?
APPLE PICKING
Popper’s eleventh birthday party. Apple picking in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin—a windless drowsy early October day, the sunlight a honeyed pink, the rows of graggled trees, the propped ladders, boys among the boughs, the plunk of apples into the little baskets. Philip took pictures, photographs that in spite of Popper’s best efforts to destroy, always seem to turn up. Alexander’s famous apple picking birthday party.
A slow day, nothing happening, just that plunk of apples into baskets and some bored kids on ladders. Miriam wandered off down the row of trees. Philip fell asleep holding his camera. At one point that afternoon Popper began throwing his apples at his friends. The version he tells himself is that his friends, Manny and everybody else who’d come to his apple picking party, Barkus and Moose
and Samnick, threw apples also, back at him and at each other. That it was one big, joyous Wisconsin apple war. This has never been true. The others, even Manny, were too startled to fight back, and they knew immediately it wasn’t a game. The birthday boy threw apples at his friends because they’d come to his party. His father asleep, his mother gone. The light like honey, the ladders propped against the trees, the sleepy day.
TUESDAYS IN THE CITY
That Hal Rosencrantz loved Miriam Popper shouldn’t have come as much of a shock to anyone. Who didn’t love Miriam? The evidence: Hal and Miriam would meet at the Belden Coffee Shop on certain Tuesday afternoons when Miriam wasn’t substitute teaching. Hal would take off work, Martha ensconced somewhere in a meeting.
The evidence reached Martha only after an acquaintance of hers spotted them on more than one Tuesday. I saw your husband the other day with your young protégée. In broad daylight, just a few blocks from the townhouse, at the Belden, having coffee. Maybe they wanted to be caught. But for Miriam, the truth was, it was less the Tuesdays in Martha and Hal’s extra bedroom (the old maid’s room at the back of the townhouse)—fumbling and graceless but somehow untiring, years since it had been untiring—than the coffee after. Hal asked her things. Miriam was in her early thirties by then, and up to then nobody had ever asked her much about her life.
“Tell me more.”
“My father was an odd duck. He collected phone books.”
“Interesting. I wonder why.”
“Names. He liked to read all the names. I think he thought there was something almost biblical about the lists. Like those long lists of names in the Old Testament. Maybe knowing there were so many people he’d never know, never meet, somehow made him feel less alone.”
“Tell me something else.”
“I used to go skating on Watupa Pond.”
“Watupa?”
“Local Indians. They were long gone by my time. They only left the name.”
“Always how it goes, isn’t it? Names again—”
For Martha, it was less Hal’s betrayal than Miriam’s insult. She had clearly taken advantage of what everybody knew was Hal’s weakness. The man’s an utterly ridiculous romantic. Who didn’t know that? Drop your glove on the sidewalk and the man swoons for weeks. Even so, for good measure, she threw Hal out of the townhouse. Love, Hal? Maybe like most people Martha was more than a little bit afraid of it. Could be she’d felt its terrible warping once or twice herself. A week later she took him back. Because we Rosencrantzes are builders. Lyric Opera houses don’t get built on daydreams. You don’t lick poverty on whispered nonsenses over coffee. Not in this city or anywhere else. Progress takes brick and labor and tenacity and money. Get over her, Hal, we’ve still got work to do. Anyway, she’s charmless. Isn’t she charmless? Isn’t she? Hal? Hal?
THE GREEN COUCH
After dinner—was it after dinner?
It must have been after dinner. Miriam must have come upstairs to the TV room to be with them after dinner. She’d never done it before. She’d always stayed downstairs with him and the dishes, and that’s usually when—
But Philip followed her upstairs and pushed her onto the green couch and then fell on top of her, punching: I don’t give a damn who you—but to humiliate me in front of every two-bit lawyer in Chicago? And Leo jumped on his back and started biting him in the neck and yelled to Alexander to call 911, and Alexander did. There was a phone on top of the television, the old Zenith that was more like a cabinet than a TV. But when the woman answered, he didn’t really know what to say, and he would later remember imagining her on the other end of the phone listening to some kid pant into her ear. Can you speak slow and tell me what the problem is? Him holding the phone and the three others silent—even his father not saying anything at all, not even shouting—and then all of them sliding off the couch onto the floor, which seemed to wake everybody up out of a daze. Popper breathing harder and harder into the phone and the woman’s soothing voice coaxing him, asking him for the address, and him finally saying, whispering, “105 Riparian Lane. R-I-P-A-R-I-A-N. It means by the water.” Philip began weeping and yelping apologies, and Miriam, without a word, stood up and went to the guest room and closed but didn’t lock the door.
When the police showed up, the car crept lightless, slowly, up the gravel so as not to alarm the neighbors. The two hulks standing there sheepish, too big for the front hall, Philip and Miriam saying, We are so sorry for the misunderstanding. Saying—but not with words—we are not the kind of people who would ever need the police. In fact, we would be pillars of this community if there was a community to be a pillar of. We are terribly sorry. One of those things. Only one of those things.
The two cops shy, looking at their big feet, wanting to look at Miriam, too shy to look at Miriam.
“Injuries? It’s procedure that we ask if there’s been any—”
Miriam and Philip chorused at the same time: “No, no injuries!”
April 2, 1945
Well, I finally have set foot on some formerly held enemy territory—All I can say is that the whole country should see the lousy strips of sand and stone that men have died for—The American plan of conquest is to blast the hell out of a place so that not even a blade of grass is alive—Move in and set up a bar, an ice machine, and then start importing whiskey, beer, and Coca-Cola—Build a post office—Open the Chamber of Commerce—Dig graves—
THE GREEN COUCH
Or maybe it was Popper who leaped on Philip’s back and Popper who teethed him in the neck, and it was Leo who called 911? Popper and his father and his mother gumbling off the couch to the hardwood floor, the floor waking them up, and his mother standing and his father on his knees, hoarse and half-crying. Then, not long after, all of them, the whole tattered family, in the front hall, the two blue oafs, shifting their weight from foot to foot, hands fidgeting, looking at the floor, not looking at Miriam, trying not to look at Miriam, staring at Miriam. We are not the kind of people who—
NURSE KELLNER
No white uniform for Nurse Kellner, fuzzy sweater and blue jeans, glasses on a string riding her chest; she sits behind a metal desk in her office and waits—for you. You want to tell me where it hurts? What do you need? How about an an ice pack? Not much on the face of the earth that can’t be cured with a few kind words and some ice. Your pain was her pain and the answer always: ice. Bloody nose, ice; stomach trouble, prune juice and a little ice; complete mental freak-out, ice. She didn’t even have to stand up. The little freezer was behind her desk and the panacea pre-wrapped in napkins. Every hour of every day, you went to her, stood before her desk, years of you, decades of you. Don’t you have a brother? You look like him. Leon? Where’s the pain? All over and nowhere at the same time, Nurse Kellner. How about two packs, one for your head and one for your soul? Lie down a while? That little bed in her office, orange bedspread matched the carpet. Don’t worry, leave your shoes on. Peaches and Herb low on the radio. Nurse Kellner would sleep with her head cradled in her hands, her elbows triangled out, so that if the principal walked by her open door, it looked as if she was contemplating some serious medical problem. And maybe she was, maybe she was dreaming of pain—hers, yours, numb it, the best you can do, the only thing, numb it.
THE GUEST ROOM
Not one quiet in the guest room but many, building on themselves, multiplying like cells. Miriam’s silences spread to every corner of the house, to the space behind the furnace where sick, wheezing Sir Edmund sleeps beside the blue flame.
They’d never had many guests.
A closed-door room in a house of closed doors. Two closets, one locked. This is where the silver is kept. Always the threat that no matter how much a part of the family the help, they still one day might be tempted to run off with the silver. Two windows, one looking out at the backyard, the other at Mrs. McLendon’s garage next door. The bureau is empty. Most of Miriam’s clothes are still in Philip’s room. But Popper, spying, knew that mostly she changed in the la
undry room in the basement. There is a night table with nothing on it, no clock. The big guest bed. The four posts are topped with pineapples that look to Popper like grenades, and sometimes before she comes home from work and he’s alone in the house, he stands on that bed and pulls one out of its socket and throws it on the floor to blow the place up to blow it up.
IN THE BACKYARD
Leo reading Ayn Rand. Late fall, the dead leaves already hard and crinkled, the old brown grass, Leo on his back in a blue-and-black-checked lumberman’s coat, holding The Fountainhead over his head with both hands, reading, imbibing. It’s a phase, Miriam looking out the kitchen window, prays. Please, God, let that fascist bitch be a phase.
Sir Edmund beside him, gnawing on his paws.
Popper wanders outside munching a double-stuff.
“You’re in my sun.”
“There is no sun.”
“That’s what you think. You’re the kind of person who waits for the sun to come to you instead of creating your own energy.”
“Mom says if we’re looking for something to do, we could rake the leaves.”
“What about the Mexicans?”
“Dad fired them. He says they did something to the roses.”
“Go away. Stop being superfluous.”
“What are you reading?”
“What’d I say? Vámanos.”
“What is it?”
“The Bible.”
“Oh, got a different cover.”
Popper stands there licking the cream off his cookie.