Love and Shame and Love

by Peter Orner

  THE CATCHER

  Plumper than ever that summer. Baloney slices in bed. Entire packages of Oscar Mayer blissfully consumed. At first practice Coach Cameron throws him a catcher’s mitt and a mask.

  Mr. Popper, won’t you catch for us?

  Fattish kids catch. He plays for Lake Car Wash. Red hats, red shirts, red stirrup socks that hook under the bottom of your foot. Coach Cameron has a bushy mustache and teaches English at the College of Lake County. He’s nobody’s dad. He tells Popper that the catcher has the odd and not unimportant role of being not in the game exactly but at the same time is the game. Coach Cameron asks if this makes sense, and at first he just nods his head as if he’s got a clue what the man’s talking about, but after a few games he thinks he sees what it all means. He stands literally outside of the action, the only player, as Coach Cameron says, for whom foul territory is actually home. A catcher is a kind of bystander God. But you couldn’t have a battery without him. Thurman Munson, Carlton Fisk, Johnny Bench, Steve Swisher. He gets the ball back to the pitcher—Manny—who puts everything in motion. Then he sits back on his hams and watches the world—his world—which is now free to fuck up however it feels like fucking up. His job is simply to deliver back the ball. Stolen bases, plays at the plate, things that directly involve him are rare. Frequent wild pitches an exception, but even so. It’s the day-in, day-out, pitch after pitch. He catches the ball. He tries to catch the ball. He throws it back to Manny. The attrition of back and forth. And maybe it’s not even about the ball. Maybe it’s only the gesture of return. He crouches. The ump’s knee in his back. The tensing of his hams. Tense those hams, Coach Cameron says. Popper alone in foul territory. The ump is only a prop. There is no honest judge in Lil’ Pony League or anywhere else. His mitt like a fat waiting mouth. And a world no longer his seen through the bars of a cage.

  April 14, 1945

  Sweetheart, I started this letter a few days ago but have not had a chance to finish it—We received the news of the President’s death and of course we were all shocked—It was certainly a cruel twist of fate that he should be taken on the eve of the victory—I guess there is no doubt he gave his life for his country—Would you send a copy of the Chicago Sun? I’m starving for more news—They only tell us things in thin little trickles—Your box of Fannie Mays arrived yesterday—and it was swell and came in good condition—very well wrapped! Except that there were no creams—just caramels and nougats—

  CHURCHILLIAN SCENE

  Seymour took a position in a suburban bank as a vice president. There were many vice presidents, but Seymour insisted he was the true second in command, a heartbeat away from honcho. One day he took Popper with him to Downers Grove to repossess a car. Seymour was of the opinion that a vice president shouldn’t always hide behind the almighty desk but must also go out among the people.

  A woman answered the door. She was tall and wore glasses and was holding a piece of toast.

  “Well, hello.”

  “Mrs. Charlotte Anders?”

  “Is this for the Cub Scouts? You’re not in uniform.”

  “We’re from the bank. We’re here for your Cutlass.”

  Mrs. Anders was sexy in a teachery Rosalynn Carter sort of way. Popper imagined she’d just come from reading a book and had set the book on the table, facedown. Now the book was waiting for her like a small house with a small peaked roof. A tall woman, her dress was short, at least it seemed that way to him. Her knees were bare and bunchy. It was an afternoon in August. The mail had come, but she hadn’t retrieved it. It was sticking out of the box. She was the kind of person who could wait for days to retrieve the mail. Popper liked that about her.

  The woman went away for a moment and came back without the toast. There was no car in the driveway.

  “Your payments, Mrs. Anders. Our records show they’re fourteen weeks overdue.”

  “You seem a bit young.”

  “But not too young,” Seymour said. “There’s nothing in the statute that prohibits minors from repossession cases so long as they, of course, don’t drive the vehicle!”

  The woman looked up at the trees. “My husband has the car.”

  Popper kept his eyes on her knees. They were not so much fat as bunched up from all that sitting and reading and grading papers and waiting while her students took quizzes. Cheated on quizzes. Popper often cheated on quizzes. Seymour cleared his throat.

  She stood there, holding open the screen door. Then she looked at the drab, bleached sky and smiled mournfully. Maybe she thought the kid was going to let her off. He felt the heat of his grandfather’s breath on his neck. What would Churchill do? “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire.” Make the choice, are you a bulldog or are you Neville Chamberlain?

  “Mrs. Anders, I’m sorry, but we have other cases.”

  “Other cars to take away?”

  “One van and a boat, actually.”

  “My husband’s dead. And he took the car with him.”

  “Would it be all right, Mrs. Anders, if we had a quick look in your garage?”

  She held her ground. He waited. He’d been trained to wait. Finally, she pulled him inside her house, murmuring, “Little banker, come here, little banker…”

  You want there to be an end to moments like this, but they go on. Upon moments like these, time never stops gnawing its little beaver teeth. And the dialogue never stops, even after we stop listening. Now Popper talks in his head, and even he hardly hears it. He’d gone on a mission with his grandfather to Downers Grove. People have to pay for their cars, their boats, Alexander. If they take out bank loans, they have to pay the bank back. Otherwise, don’t you see, all would be anarchy. The entire system would collapse. You think we’re talking about just one lady in Downers Grove? I’d love to give her the car, hell, I’d love to give her a boat, too, why not, but don’t you see? Capitalism needs broke people. How else would anybody know they were rich? A Mrs. Charlotte Anders once pulled him inside her house, a house as dark as the inside of a shoe. Or maybe it’s only that she pulled him closer, closer, and smothered his head. People’s troubles, death, eternal sadness, even love, yes, love for your sad reading eyes. He will think of you, so many years later, he will think of you and your eyes tired from reading and the way your body smelled like soap and fresh-torn leaves, but first and foremost, above all, business is business. Do what you want with me, Mrs. Charlotte Anders—haunt me—it won’t change the bottom line. No sentimentalists us. And, also, we’ll be needing the keys to the Oldsmobile.

  BOMBARDMENT

  Bombardment, the art of it, the raising the ball above your head and aiming at one person, Stu Bortz, when the person you really intend to nail, Brian Dombrowski, is just on the edge of your vision, last-minute pivot and throw and bango, Dombrowski gets it in the neck—is akin to the art of enduring the seventh grade, which is akin to the art of enduring our lives period, because isn’t it all about hitting people before they can hit you? Remember the squeak of rubber and all the laughing and the threatening and the acrobatic avoidance and even when somebody buys it in the eye—play must go on. In this game, we stop for no man or crying Fiona Nardini. It is true, though, that there are a few who are savvy enough to understand that to truly survive it’s a lot less about the hitting than the evading. Let everybody else kill each other. Just play it cool, non-aggressive, Swiss, Manny Laveneaux–style. Lurk around the outskirts of the game, maybe pick up a stray ball and toss it at somebody halfheartedly, but always keep your eye on your own back. Yet we’re talking here only about a chosen few, the rare ones, the graceful ones left standing in the end. Definitely not Popper. He’s happily part of the rabble, and anyway, he never wanted to win. Like everybody else he just wanted to kill.

  JACOB ROSENCRANTZ

  Of Jacob’s funeral itself he remembers the shocked silence. A thing like this wasn’t supposed to happen. Jacob died, the doctors said, of a concave heart. He had had it all along. He was a junior in high school when he suddenl
y slumped over in the middle of class. Popper remembers sitting in the funeral home, stuffed like a sausage into one of Leo’s old blazers. They didn’t come in as a family, but they sat together as one. Philip and Miriam next to each other, stiff, occasionally bumping shoulders.

  I hear you’ve found a friend.

  Phil, we’re at a funeral.

  He remembers that his mother’s head didn’t seem to move for the entire service, and yet in a weird way, to him, it was moving, as if Miriam was getting farther and farther away from this place, this scene. He sat silent, sometimes standing up, trying to get a glimpse of Leah and Eli, Martha and Hal. It occurred to him that the Rosencrantzes were even easier to hate now that Jacob was out of the picture for good. It also occurred to him, I’m not dead, I may be a fattish little stupid pig, but at least I am not dead.

  In the middle of the service, the rabbi still speaking, Martha stood up, looked around in bewilderment at the enormous crowd of mourners. Then she slowly walked down the aisle and out the banging double doors.

  After, in the foyer, Martha was sitting on a lone folding chair. An impromptu receiving line formed, and one by one people went to her, stooped to her. She seemed not to recognize anybody, but when it came Miriam’s turn, her eyes focused and she nearly fell off the chair into Miriam’s arms. They had not spoken in years, but it was to Miriam that she had words to say, words that Leo, Popper, and Miriam still repeat, words that sometimes overshadow Jacob’s death itself. Or maybe they help him live on? Sometimes they repeat the line out of cruelty. Other times out of something opposite.

  “Oh, Miriam, I feel like I’m in a Fellini movie.”

  Miriam said, “I know, I know.”

  MAYOR REGRETS

  Bernie Epton comes to him like other dead. Out of a crack in the day, out of the anarchy of his awake dreams. Popper at his desk, crafting a plea agreement—isn’t one way or another our whole life made up of plea agreements? Okay, okay, I did it. Now don’t I deserve a lesser sentence for saying so—and suddenly, deep in his ears, another guilty voice murmurs: Shut up, shut up, shut up.

  Election night, 1983. He and Leo are watching the returns on TV in the White Cedar apartment. Maybe it was exhaustion. Or maybe the campaign had, finally, driven Epton as bonkers as some Harold Washington partisans claimed he’d been all along. On paper the man was a living miracle. He’d just won 48.6 percent of the vote, a hangnail short of being elected mayor of Chicago.

  Even Popper knew that Bernie Epton was a wild-eyed Republican from another planet. And a Jew no less. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Miriam once told them, Remember, we’re Democrats before we’re Jews. It’s the only thing that’s nonnegotiable. We believe in social programs and hate war unless it’s absolutely necessary.

  Leo kept flipping the channels, from Harold Washington’s raucous victory party to Bernie Epton’s concession speech.

  “Wait,” Popper said. “Turn back to Channel 2. Let’s watch Bernie a little longer.”

  “Why?”

  “It looks like his head is going to explode.”

  “By jove, you’re right. You’re getting perceptive, Alexanderilyich.”

  His people were still cheering him on, and finally Bernie couldn’t take it anymore. From the podium, he began shouting at his own supporters. Please, would you all just shut up!

  Because Bernie Epton wanted to speak. He wanted to say something profound. He had wisdom to dispense. I’m an intellectual, a lakefront liberal, for God’s sake. I’m a Republican because I believe in fiscal restraint and I’m against sweetheart deals for the unions. Mayors don’t go to war, dumbo. Unless they’re Richard Daley—who was a Democrat. I never meant for things to get so out of hand. I’m no monster. I’m only a human being. Who wouldn’t have been seduced by the possibility? God grants you how many chances at immortality? And if there’s somebody somewhere who holds a title more glorious than His Honor Mayor of the City of Chicago, we never heard of him in Illinois. And, hear me, hear me loud and clear, I didn’t play the race card; other people snatched it out of my hand and laid it down for me. Blame a man for going along for the ride for the good of the city? If the people in the streets have to call Harold Washington a child molester to stop him from getting elected, then they’ve got to call him a child molester. Cicero accused Cataline of bestiality with donkeys, all kinds of unspeakable things. That’s politics.

  Win first, heal later. Is that your plea, Bernie?

  Now wait, Bernie says to Popper from beyond the grave. Hold it right there, partner, I only said tax cheat, I never said child molester. I deplored child molester. Get your facts straight. The truth is bad enough without some snotnose ex-suburbanite lying about it, even in his random, private meanderings. And I always said, “This election is not about colors. If I thought for one moment that this election was about colors, I wouldn’t be standing before you today… My fellow Chicagoans, I will lead you from the desert to the city of hope, to the golden city of your dreams…”

  The choice between a sheeny and a shine? What’s a Chicagoan to do? And Newsweek shouted to the country, to the world: WHAT’S GOING ON IN CHICAGO?

  Tax cheat? Child molester? What’s the difference? A con’s a con. Go get ’em, Jew boy. Italians for Eptonini. Irish for MacEpton. Poles for Eptonizinski. Mexicans for Bernie Cruz. Wait, what? (Never mind, just pull the lever for the white guy.) Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!

  And Popper thinks of you now, delusions thumping down on your head like wet March snow. Jesus? Moses? You weren’t even a good Judas. You’re a footnote, Bernie. The real story is Jane Byrne and Richie Daley and how Harold Washington made them both look like the hacks they were. It was Harold who had the class, the elocution, the ideas. It was Harold who kept sending the reporters to their dictionaries. Mayor Contretemps. Mayor Hoisted by Your Own Petard.

  You, Bernie, were Mayor Almost. Mayor Not Quite. Mayor Already Forgotten.

  But tell the truth. Who gets remembered? And for once, Popper understands something fundamental about politics without Leo having to explain it to him. The loser’s party is always more interesting than the victor’s. That spirit of chin up, all those dumb balloons hanging up there dreaming of release, of that slow victorious float to the floor. Is there anything so beautifully democratic as a concession speech, even when the conceder’s having a total meltdown?

  Shut up and listen, Bernie pleaded.

  Popper thinks now, I know what you were trying to say, Bernie. That your heart was broken, and not only because you lost. The world’s an ugly, ruthless place, you wanted to say. There isn’t nearly enough love. Love, you wanted to sermonize into the microphone, in front of the cameras, in front of the city, what this city needs is love—

  But how to explain this? Who’d believe it? Popper believes you, Mayor Regrets. In this, you speak for all of us. They should put your name on a plaque somewhere. Rest well in purgatory, Bernie. Your bones in Oak Woods Cemetery, 1035 E. 67th Street, in the Jewish section, just across the road from Harold Washington’s sad, grand mausoleum.

  105 RIPARIAN LANE

  Dinner at home. Home? What is he supposed to call this place now? Wednesday, again. Philip’s not back from work. Still got a little time to himself—

  Above the toilet in the downstairs bathroom (they always called it the “Powder Room,” mocking the Rosencrantzes) is a small framed picture of a young pinkish girl. Under her chest are the words: A Tribute to My Pretty Star. Her porcelain face, her fat delicious cheeks. As far as he knows, she’s still hanging above the toilet, wondering where Popper disappeared to. Where has he disappeared to?

  And there was something else about the powder room other than his Pretty Star. If you stood on the toilet itself, you could see out a small window that had a good view of the Krawchecks’ driveway next door to the east. Unlike the McLendons, the Krawchecks had always been almost invisible neighbors. They lived behind a wall and line of tall trees and rarely came out in the street. It was generally thought that because the Krawchecks
had a direct lake view out their back windows, they considered themselves above everybody else on Riparian Lane. But they had a daughter about Popper’s age. He’d never known her very well. Her name was Daphne. He’d never known her very well, because she went to private school. (Now, that’s some serious class, to send your kid to private school when you live in the suburbs.)

  Consequently, like her parents, Daphne also held herself aloof from the neighborhood. Further adding to her mystique was the fact that she’d been adopted. Popper, who was saddled with the knowledge that whatever was missing between his mother and father had created him, had always been a little jealous of her. That Daphne could, with a flip of her hand, say, “Hey, you see those two over there masquerading as my parents? No relation, none.” To be able to cast off this town, this neighborhood, Riparian Lane itself—it was an awesome power. Even her name was incongruent. It was a made-up country, like Yugoslavia. There was no such person as Daphne Krawcheck. Daphne Krawcheck was a fiction. And some days in spring she’d come home from her private school in Lake Forest and lie in the driveway, in her tweed private-school field hockey–looking dress, and stare at the sky, and Popper would stand on the toilet waiting for her skirt to crawl higher, higher, exposing milk-white private-school thighs.

  Daphne Krawcheck composes poems in her head on the asphalt driveway, and Popper is a scumbag.

  Why is it that shame never stops bleeding? Even now, he’s still standing on that toilet? Even now, the whole world knows he’s up on that toilet aching himself to a vision of Daphne Krawcheck? A girl he’d once said hey to while riding past her driveway, nothing more, ever.