by Peter Orner
“What are you reading?” Leo says.
“Nothing. I’m talking to you.”
“See, there’s your problem. You don’t engage your mind. You lack initiative. You’re a useless loaf taking up space. How are you going to have any impact if you never do anything?”
Popper sits down next to the dog and gives him the last of the cookie. Sir Edmund, more out of obligation than interest, takes it in his mouth. Even the dog today.
Leo tosses the book in the grass and gets up, struts out the back gate toward the bluff at the end of the block. Popper looks at the trees, the old grass; at the McLendons’ sagging fence, at the dog chewing on his paws. He picks up the Bible.
Late at night, often, Dominique came to Roark’s room. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial. It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred.
Nice.
In the trees, a bobwhite bobwhites another bobwhite who bobwhites, demurely, back. Bob? Bobwhite?
Bobwhite, bobwhite, bobwhite.
Bob White…?
Bobwhite!
Bobwhite, bobwhite, bob white bob whitebob bobwhite, bobwhite, bobwhite…
Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, White, Bobwhite, Bobwhite, Bobwhite, Bobwhite, Bobwhite, Bobwhite!
Whitebob, Bob! White! Bobwhite! Bobwhite!
Bobwhite.
Bobwhite.
Popper checks the window for lack of his mother and works his hand down his pants and waits. Above, the sky is a white lake with flecks of raining ash.
WALKER BROTHERS
When Allen Dorfman was gunned down in the parking lot of the purple Hyatt in Lincolnwood, Seymour took pride in the fact that one of their own was still high enough in the mob to rub out. See, he said, not all the Jews have moved to the North Shore and become dentists.
He’d been indicted again. Dorfman was the syndicate’s chief accountant. He ran the Teamsters’ pension fund, the mightiest unregulated bank on earth. Dorfman seeded the clouds that rained mob money on sunny Vegas. The other clouds he bought off. Or had deposed of by other means. But above all, Allen Dorfman was a keeper of secrets. Five, six, seven federal indictments, and still he hadn’t sung. The eighth was the charm. Dorfman was looking at twenty-five years in the pen and he wasn’t a young guy anymore. The FBI had wiretaps. Why take chances? The boss, Joey the Clown Lombardo, decreed it. Joey the Clown, whose children Dorfman had bounced on his knees—they loved each other like brothers, Cain and Abel, the Dago and the Kike. Nothing personal, Allen. You and I both know this is nothing personal. For the good of the body, sometimes a neck has to go. Your neck, my neck, a neck is a neck. Anyway, I’m doing you a favor. You want to spend your golden years in Joliet?
In the parking lot, they shot Allen Dorfman seven times in the back of the head.
Philip knew him from summer camp. They’d gone to Ojibwa together. He said Dorfman used to steal the tennis balls and sell them back to the counselors at a markup. One time, he ransomed the camp dog.
And they used to catch glimpses of the man himself, in the flesh, at Walker Brothers, sitting in his corner booth. Seymour and Bernice would take Alexander and Leo there for breakfast Sunday mornings. Dorfman wasn’t a big man, but his deep tan radiated influence, glitz—his rings, his English suits, his pomaded hair. Everybody pretended to love their omelets and waffles and time with the grandkids, and the whole time watched the man over the lips of their coffee cups. For a man with so many secrets, he talked like a megaphone. “Hey, Howie? You don’t come by? We’re cousins and you don’t come by?” And cousin Howard, befuddled, shrugs and says, “Allen, you know how it goes, the wife, the kids”—pausing, pausing—“the day job.”
“You know what you are, Howard?”
“Allen, look, I’m sorry, I—”
Quiet at first. Dorfman’s eyes water a little. This is all about family, about loyalty, about the ties that bind. “Howard,” Dorfman says, slowly dragging it out. H-o-w-a-r-d. Then he wiggles a little in his seat. “Howard Pincus, you’re a wart on my ass. I should have strangled you in your crib in ’38.”
Dorfman was four booths away. When the din of forks and blather rose again, Seymour said, “You can’t say that the man doesn’t have a certain style. Every day the man works side by side the scum of the earth, yet he breakfasts with his own kind. I’d call that class.”
Popper scootched up and over the ledge of the booth to get a better look, the leather under his sweaty thighs, that fartish rip. Dorfman was chewing, a bit of powdered sugar on his nose.
“He’s a bagman for the scum of the earth,” Leo said.
“Now you’re a Maoist? What happened to rational self-interest?”
“And he makes his dough off the backs of the little people.”
“Exactly,” Seymour practically shouted. “At last the boy shows some sense. It’s the way of the world.” With his knife, he harpooned an egg yolk and brought it to his mouth.
“The man shoots people.” Bernice yawned.
“He doesn’t shoot people,” Seymour said. “His people shoot people. There’s a difference. If I say go out and shoot somebody and you go out and do it, you’re going to blame me? Allen Dorfman’s got charisma. You’re going to blame a man for having charisma? Show me a man with charisma and I’ll show you—”
“Seymour,” Bernice said, “there’s egg on your shirt.” She took a napkin and dipped it in her water glass, reached across the table, and pressed it against his chest as if she were staunching a wound. And in a way she was. Seymour’s despair would manifest itself at the oddest times. Even here, even now, at Walker Brothers, in the presence of Allen Dorfman. His wife doesn’t love him. She’s never loved him. Even his grandkids don’t love him. Sometimes feared, sometimes worshipped, more often ridiculed, but loved, never.
“You see, charisma’s rare. It’s got to be stamped out the moment it rears its ugly head. Isn’t that right, Bernice?”
Bernice blew her nose.
“How come Dorfman doesn’t have a nickname?” Popper asked as he carved a leery mouth in his last pancake.
“Jews don’t have nicknames,” Bernice said.
“What about Hymie Weiss?” Leo said.
“Not Jewish,” Seymour said. “But good try.”
“Dopey Fein?”
“There’s a bingo.”
“Seymour, the check,” Bernice said.
Seymour, vanquished, returned to the dregs of his breakfast. If Popper had his way, though, Dorfman would have been finished off at Walker Brothers. There was so much glorious plate glass to come crashing down. So much beautiful chaos to be had during breakfast on a Sunday morning. Seymour saying, “This is it, my boys, this is what we’ve been waiting for.”
The gunfire, the overturned tables, the whimpering aftermath. And they were there. They nearly got knocked off by Joey the Clown when he did in Allen Dorfman at Walker Brothers. For the good of the body, sometimes the accountant has got to go. Can’t you see it? Dorfman bleeding among his own people, his bold, pomaded head in a pool of maple syrup?
And Bernice, double-checking her hair, tsking. What absolute nonsense. Even a mob hit would bore her. Allen Dorfman bored her. Seymour especially bored her. Popper keeps an old picture of her from the twenties on his desk: Bernice dressed in feathers, her right leg raised parallel to her body, her slim bare foot rising above her head like an arrow. People say, That’s your grandmother?
TWIN POOLS
They called them the Twin Toilets. Popper indulged more than once himself. There are few things more satisfying than pissing in a pool. It’s hard to pinpoint why it’s so great—something about the engulfment of the water and becoming one with the chlorine. Just let it go, brother. Let it go. Who will ever know?
Two overcrowded public swimming pools, side by side. How many hours of his life did he spend in its pleasantly urine-warmed waters? But it isn’t the toilets Popper wants
right now. It’s the disinfectant pool, the shallow rectangular bath of chemicals you had to step in as soon as you came out of the locker room showers, where you’d just pretended to take a shower. The water was frigid, colder even than the showers. Yet if you dared to sidestep the disinfectant pool, the lifeguards would throw you out. For the season. No first warning. No appeal. They’d watch that little pool like hawks. They would rather somebody drowned.
NO DIVING
NO RUNNING
NO SPLASHING
NO KICKBOARDS AFTER 3:00
PERSONS WITH COMMUNICABLE DISEASES NOT ALLOWED
ALL SWIMMERS MUST USE DISINFECTANT POOL
You went in quick. Try it with one foot. Step in, step out.
Both feet! I said both feet!
Call this a vision of nothing much. Popper at twelve, his big bowl of hair, his ill-fitting nylon Speedo clinging to his thighs and drooping in the middle. Fat belly protruding. Unclipped toenails. Chubbled knees.
It was around this time that Miriam sent him to see a psychologist. The psychologist insisted that Popper call him Jack. Not Dr. Jack, just Jack. I’m only a guy you can talk to, Alexander, and you don’t even have to talk.
Jack fed him Jay’s potato chips and Cokes.
Popper didn’t mind going to see Jack. He loved the alternating tastes of salty chips and Coke. He’d conduct science experiments in his mouth. There was this frizzle he could create if he ate and drank fast enough. Frizzle followed by operatic burps.
So you’re sad? Your mother tells me you have been feeling sad. She says you have good reasons.
She said that?
She did. Yes. So are you? Are you sad, Alexander?
I guess so.
Why do you think you’re sad?
I don’t know. (Burp.)
You don’t know?
I guess I feel guilty.
Guilty? Guilty about what?
I hate my family.
You know, I don’t know you very well, Alexander, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you don’t hate your family. Maybe you get annoyed with them. Maybe things aren’t going very well at home right now. I understand this. But—
Also about things I’ve done.
Ah—
Yeah. And things I will do.
Things you will do?
I guess so. (Burp.)
Hmmmm. That’s an awfully advanced stage of guilt for someone your age. I’d say that’s to be commended. What sorts of things will you do to feel guilty about down the line?
I’m going to maybe betray them.
Really? Your family?
Yes.
When you say betray, what exactly do you mean?
I mean betray. I mean I’m a liar. (Burp.) Ask me something and I’ll look you straight in the face and lie my ass—
More chips, Alexander? We’re running low on time today.
Yes, Jack, please. More chips.
And from Jack’s to his bike locked in the alley. And then riding down Central Avenue past the Clark Station, the new Style Shop, past the Jewel, the Rec Center, past the fire station, past Manny’s new house, where his family finally moved just before they knocked down the Shafner house, past the little houses by the highway where the Mexicans live, up and over the overpass to the Twin Toilets.
He’s just faked a shower. A little trickle of water on his shoulders. He comes out and steps into the little pool. Except that’s it. He doesn’t move. He stays in the disinfectant pool. The cold stiffs his ankles. Chemicals kill the fungi on his feet. I’m going to stay here—right here with both feet.
(Echoes, voices)
Marco!
Polo!
Marco!
Hey, green shorts—off the ropes!
Right here like a statue, like a monument, like a gift from his old lying self to his present lying self. It’s 1979. Popper, don’t move. Hold your ground. You’re a strange alone kid being pushed from behind. Before you the great blue sewers.
Move, idiot! What are you doing?
Get the fuck out of the way!
April 7, 1944
Mine darling, my river perch, my swordfish—Saw some white women for the first time out here—army nurses—and what a tough-looking bunch—Of course most of them are pushing forty-five and shouldn’t be allowed to wear pants—Still you should see the heads turn when one of them walks by—C’est la guerre—C’est la guerre—
CHOPIN IN HIGHLAND PARK
Taking recorder was allegedly a precursor to learning the violin. Music, Miriam said, is a lifelong vocation, like golf and tennis. It will provide you with a social outlet when you’re older.
“Golf and tennis are for assholes.”
“Oh, Alex, don’t be like your father and revel in despising where you come from while at the same time remaining happily part of it. If your father hated this world he was born into so much he could have moved away from here years ago, but no, here’s a man who lives a mile away from his parents.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just give the recorder a try, honey.”
Her name was Mrs. Gerstadt and she lived in a gingerbread house on Dale Avenue. In this puny troll of a house, she gave music lessons. Popper would stand before the music stand in a sunroom filled with dusty plants she never watered. He’d tootle on his recorder, and Mrs. Gerstadt would watch him as if in pain. Sometimes she’d lean toward him and absentmindedly correct his fingering, her breasts bumping his shoulder. Mrs. Gerstadt’s breasts were nothing like fruit. They were more like small fists punching out of her shirt, not in anger, casually. This occasional contact kept him going to recorder lessons, violin in his future or no violin in his future.
His hours with Mrs. Gerstadt may also have been Popper’s first lesson in the truth that what you must do to get by in this world is often tedious and mind-numbing and even humiliating, but that if you didn’t expend too much mental effort, it was possible to make it through the day. So Mrs. Gerstadt taught recorder and (he assumed) violin to Highland Park’s Zimbalists and Heifetzes who actually made it that far. If there was a husband or children in that tiny house, they have been expunged from the record. Popper’s memory is an increasingly emptier room. The less furniture, the more he gropes around.
He never touched a violin.
Mrs. Gerstadt had tangled, prematurely gray hair and vague, distant eyes. At the end of the lesson she’d sit him down in the old kitchen chair in the corner and put on a record as if to cleanse them both—and the violated air itself—of the tooty abominations he’d been blowing out the last forty-five minutes.
As the music played, she’d whisper facts about the composers. Who went insane. Who mourned his too many dead children. Who got chased away by Nazis. Who jumped into the icy waters of the Moldau and flowed down the river with the current. And Chopin? You know what they did to him? When he died in Paris, they sliced his heart out and mailed it home to Poland. The French held on to his brain and fingers.
One day she put on Bach’s cello suites and wept without tears. Popper watched her, gripping his recorder. She trembled. He couldn’t feel what she was feeling. He squinted and hummed a little, tried to follow some notes. Mrs. Gerstadt reached for him and dug her fingers into his shoulder blade as if to say, Don’t twitch, listen, just listen, you little oaf, listen. And the sound in the room got deeper and more terrible, a long dire moaning, and he tried to feel it, in his gut he tried to feel it—
A forgotten afternoon in a too hot room and Mrs. Gerstadt has just taken her hand from his shoulder and given up on him completely. Not only doesn’t he have talent, he doesn’t even have ears. Bach, and to him it could be the toilet flushing. And then—as now, this minute—all he wants is to jump on Mrs. Gerstadt and crush her sadness with his confusion and his sick sick wants, in the sunroom with the dead plants.
PHILIP AND MIRIAM
They don’t speak. They sit listening to a Dionne Warwick record on the stereo, and these days are getting longer and these nights ar
e lasting decades, and Miriam puts her hand slowly to her mouth and breathes into her fingers. Between them, on the low table, is Philip’s chessboard. Dionne sings, What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie? The light outside is a thick, dark green. Philip thinks of seaweed, of trying to see through seaweed. The people who owned this house before them left a tall flagpole on the lawn. Philip didn’t get rid of it; that pole represented a permanence, a rootedness, This is our place. When Popper was seven, playing running bases with Manny, he ran into the flagpole and conked himself out. Does a lawn retain its histories? Do living rooms? Chairs? Philip watches the flagpole. He no longer hoists the flag every morning, but the rope that runs the flag up the pole remains and so does the heavy metal clasp that continues, even on a night with so little wind, to clang like a halyard against a mast, a faraway sound Miriam likes.
“You did something different to your hair,” Philip says.
“Did I?”
Philip coughs, but he doesn’t say anything else. Tonight he will not knock on the guest room door. He will not try to turn the knob without knocking, either. Miriam looks past him at the wall behind his head, the blank space to the right of the window, where she had always meant to hang something.
CENSUS, 1980
Miriam dressed up as the Easter bunny for Easter Seals. That bulbous-headed costume, those big floppy feet. She volunteered for the March of Dimes. She sold magazine subscriptions. She trained to be a docent at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and could speak at length about mummification and hieroglyphics. She worked as a substitute high school teacher, Gordon Tech, Lane Tech, Maine West, Glenbrook South. She also worked as a census taker. In 1980, the year the Second City was demoted to third and Jane Byrne was so livid she threatened to sue the federal government for defaming Chicago’s character, Miriam tromped the streets of the city to count the people.
Popper would go door to door with her and listen to the song and dance. Yes, I’m with the government, but the Census Bureau is an independent agency under the auspices of the Commerce Department charged solely with the collection of numerical and demographical data. We’re not interested in, for instance, your criminal record, tax history, immigration status…