Love and Shame and Love

by Peter Orner

  “Honey, you don’t mind giving your father a ride?”

  “Huh?”

  “His car’s in the shop.”

  Philip yanks the door open and clambers into the backseat. He leans over and grazes Popper’s cheek with his lips. His mother gets in and asks Philip if he has enough room.

  “It’s your new husband that has the long legs.”

  (Miriam jolly laughter.)

  Popper hasn’t been alone with them together since the Iran hostage crisis.

  “Beautiful day,” Philip says.

  “It is,” Miriam says. “It really is.”

  “My parents,” Popper says, and this startles them. Philip and Miriam giggle. Who, us? We’re not parents; we’re just two people who happened to get off the 5:19 at the same time.

  “My parents,” Popper repeats, but he can’t think of anything more to add. He drives toward the house on Riparian Lane. It isn’t that he expected some sort of fireworks. It’s only that one would think proximity would change the equation. Being apart for years is an abstraction. When you are so close that you can feel someone on your skin even if you don’t touch—shouldn’t that make for a reaction?

  “Where’s Ella?” Philip says.

  “She’s with Kat,” Popper says. “Her parents are in town from Ashland. I have her most of Friday.”

  “You know, you really must see a judge, get something on paper like your mother and I. Establish some clear rights. Not this loosey-goosey—”

  “The last thing I want to emulate is—”

  “What if she moves out of state? What’s to stop her from taking the kid and moving out of state?”

  “He’s still hoping they get back together, Phil—”

  “No, I’m not. Who told you that? Leo?”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Miriam says.

  “Happy Wustrin died,” Philip says.

  “I know, I know. Can you believe it? We’ve begun to die.”

  “Was she still with Ira?”

  “God no, Phil. Where have you been? She left Ira eons ago.”

  The two of them chatting. In the rearview his father’s eyes sag. The droop of all the years without her.

  September 9, 1945

  What a thrill I had the other day when we finally received our mail—Fourteen letters, no less—Was that delicious?—I spent all one afternoon just going over them—You simply cannot imagine what mail can mean—My only regret was that all fourteen were not from you—

  THE LAW OF INTENT

  At John Marshall, Popper’s mind mostly roamed backward. But he liked to hear all about other people’s problems for a change. He found that the study of law, finally, boiled down to this, case after case after case of other people’s problems. And the pure volume of pages of these problems battered his consciousness into a comatose submission that wasn’t at all unpleasant. It gave his brain somewhere to go.

  He especially loved trusts and estates. Who didn’t leave what to whom. The most personal agonies played out in the most turgid prose, prose he also was starting to emulate in the conversations he was beginning to have with himself.

  You’d think to the contrary but criminal law, by far, was the most tedious. Everything tends to go completely downhill after the excitement of a crime itself. Procedural questions were especially numbing, though he appreciated the spirit behind the general rule (riddled with exceptions) that a thousand of one’s past crimes couldn’t be used, per se, to prove one’s guilt in an instant case.

  One issue, however, concerning the question of criminal intent (mens rea), couldn’t help but intrigue. How do we determine intent of the perpetrator in so-called crime-of-passion cases? In other words, those murder cases where there was no pre-planning, when intent wasn’t formed until the very heat of the moment. You come home from work early. Surprise. Your wife’s in bed with your best friend. So you strangle your wife. (Your friend escapes out the window in his underwear.) That sort of case. Now the crux is this: At what point between the seeing (surprise) and the strangling (I’ll kill you with my bare hands) did the requisite mens rea to prove murder in the first degree form? Or did it? Was the murder simply a reflex devoid of any intention at all? In such a case, we’re looking at a manslaughter conviction at most. Now, what about those people who are less decisive? The irony is that hesitators fare worse in cases like these. The guy who wants to talk things over with his wife (you know, process it) before he wrings her neck. Popper counts himself in this camp. Whatever the decision—murder, what to have for lunch, which book to read—he’ll take an hour to make up his mind. And the more time it takes a person to decide, the more evidence there is of intent. Hence, don’t be a thoughtful murderer.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking about manslaughter. Or dreaming about it. I don’t know.”

  “Ella’s imaginary friend died.”

  “Chauncey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She said he died?”

  “She said he got hit by a bus tonight. At Stony Island and 57th. Squashed.”

  “Any indication the driver saw Chauncey and didn’t stop intentionally? We might have an action against the CTA.”

  “What?”

  “Tell her I’m sorry. Is she sad?”

  “She’s being pretty stoic about it. Shouldn’t she be sadder? How are we supposed to know? What time will you be here tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got class till eleven. What time is yours?”

  “Three. Can you take her from 11:30 to 2:30?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. So, see you—”

  13

  WE INVENTED THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

  Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe in, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?

  —Wright Morris, Plains Song

  THE JUDGES

  Chicago, 1998

  The old judges may no longer swim naked in the Standard Club pool.

  Women. Time was they weren’t even allowed in the club. And now? But the judges, the ones who are left—Abe Marovitz turned ninety-two this year and still does his laps—don’t complain. They of all people know what to expect. Who knows better than they the tide of this reprehensible epoch? Respect, there simply isn’t any respect anymore. Enthroned, impassive in their Civic Center courtrooms, they watch the world litigate its way to madness. Louis Brandeis is dead and gone and unremembered. And Picasso on the outside does nothing for the culture inside. It doesn’t matter who you are anymore, and lady lawyers strut into court in pants. Yet even now, as they swim their laps in bathing trunks, they wonder if it was ever true—if the world, their world, was really any better. Lunches in the Walnut Room at the Bismarck Hotel. Long dinners with their beautiful wives at Gene & Georgetti’s or Mike Fish’s. Black-tie nights at the opera, Puccini on the Plains. Now they’re sure of nothing. Were their wives ever beautiful? Were they ever as grand in life as they were in the stories they told themselves? Or was it all as much an illusion as the sight of a two-piece bathing suit emerging from the chlorine-drenched mist—by God, a bikini—on this the deck of their sacred Standard Club pool. You’re in contempt, madam! Bailiff, please remove her! Even the water—that first engulfing isn’t the same. You need to feel it like a return to the womb. A Speedo doesn’t cut it—the ancient dick needs to wiggle free. It will never be the same.

  38 SYLVESTER PLACE

  Highland Park, 1977

  In the attic of the house on Sylvester Place was a baby carriage, an old-style one with big white-wall tires and spoked wheels and a coffin-like black rubber hood. It was Philip’s and then Esther’s, and long since retired. But Leo found a use for it. He ordained it the final resting place of the ghost baby.

  It was hard not to think of death in the attic with all that dead stuff. A hamper full of old nightgowns. A pile of worn-out ballet slippers that still, when Popper put his nose in, smelled sweetly of swe
at. He found it fitting somehow that sweat outlasts the work it took to make it.

  Because didn’t they have something dead also? Miriam had told them they’d had another brother once. That he hadn’t lived long. He hadn’t lived at all, actually, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t existed.

  Popper would put on one of Bernice’s flowered shower caps and play the hauntboy. He’d lie in the carriage with that shower hat on his head and his feet hanging over the side and Leo would push him around the attic and softly whisper to him all the things he’d missed by not being alive, like, for instance, Watergate.

  “What else happened?”

  “We went to the moon. At first it was a big deal. After that nobody much cared unless the rocket blew up.”

  “What else?”

  “Ford pardoned Nixon.”

  “Come on—”

  “Mom left Dad in the dust.”

  “That hasn’t happened yet.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t know anything. You’ve been in the ground all these years.”

  “What was my name?”

  “You would have been Leo.”

  “And you?”

  “Alexander, I would have been Alexander. Mom told me once they picked out two names beforehand—”

  “And me?”

  “Which you?”

  “You know what I’m asking.”

  “I’m not sure you really get the full importance of the Ford pardon. You see, on the one hand, Ford had the country to think about, and on the other, his own skin, and for once a politician—”

  Popper went by 38 Sylvester Place the other day. That house always felt bigger when you were in it than when you were standing outside. The new owners painted the shutters the wrong color. They’re supposed to be rusty. Now they’re blue. Blue shutters on the house at 38 Sylvester Place? When Leo drove him around in that carriage, all the old attic dust would kick up, and it would combine with the light streaming in through the windows. He’d reach out, try and wrap his hand around that dust.

  BERNICE

  Now you ask questions? Why bother with any of it anymore? It’s a mistake, Alexander, to love the dead too much. The dead are easy. They can’t kick you back.

  You aren’t dead.

  It was my father who started me dancing. In Warsaw, he’d once gone to the ballet. It was Petipa’s The Pharaoh’s Daughter. The man could never get those dancing mummies out of his head. As soon as I could stand, my father had me up on my toes. My mother thought it a waste of time. You see, my mother wasn’t interested in anything that wouldn’t pay. As a young girl, just out of teacher’s college, she’d gone to work for P. K. Wrigley as his personal secretary. Everybody in her family was impressed. My mother wasn’t impressed. She said Mr. Wrigley’s teeth stank. The man manufactures every stick of chewing gum in the universe and get a load of that—the man’s teeth stink. P. K. Wrigley didn’t hire my mother because she was beautiful. He had other girls to look good. He hired her because she was good with figures. She was still working for Wrigley when she met my father. He was ten years older, born in Warsaw. They met on the street. The family said she was marrying beneath her. A man you met on the street? A foreigner? My mother said, Beneath what? Besides, aren’t I thirty? Not only was my father not even an American, he also stuttered when he spoke English. Yiddish he didn’t stutter. Now in those days of course when you married you didn’t work. And so the family said, You’re tossing over P. K. Wrigley for a filthy Polack? This from a family of Jews from Poland. What could she do? She loved the man. My father owned a bookbindery with his brothers. He bound bibles, law books, all sorts of books. He used to say, “Anything between two covers, I can bring it t-t-t-together.” A year after they were married, my parents bought a triple-decker in Rogers Park, 7232 Fargo Avenue. They rented out the other two apartments. My mother said, “This is how the rich must do it. Sit in a chair, do nothing, collect money.” We lived on the middle floor. She wanted to be able to keep an ear on both tenants. When the market went under, my parents couldn’t keep up with the payments. We lost Fargo Avenue. My father’s bindery went under, too. After that they opened the store on Pratt Boulevard and my father began, slowly, to die. Even so, Alexander, a happy marriage. Who ever heard of such a thing? And no one can say that my mother wasn’t bright. I didn’t get any of her brightness. Wish I did. I was an only child, all she had, a disappointment. She’d grab ahold of my chin and say—Bernice, of all the ridiculous. Take a wink of me. A wink of your father. Us still peasants and you swan around the Gish sisters? You’ll end up without a roof. She was wrong about the roof. You know, I always say I gave up dancing because I married Seymour. But how to say this other than just to say it? I didn’t have the talent to make it in New York and so I came home and married Seymour. Then the children, then the war, and how could anybody dance seriously during the war? Maybe this is even true. After I became afraid of dancing it didn’t matter what I did.

  But you taught it, Granbean, for years and years, you taught—

  That’s not dancing.

  September 12, 1945

  I must admit it was a thrill to sail up Tokyo Bay and see our fleet—what a tremendous sight—battleships, cruisers, carriers, destroyers, Liberties, tankers, LSTs and MSMs—as far as the eye can see. Ships, ships, ships—What a magnificent demonstration of American power! Oh, darling, what can’t this country accomplish?

  VAN BUREN AND LASALLE

  The steady rain softly pelting his head, Popper was standing on the corner. Even though the light had changed, he was still waiting for it—or waiting for something. Like when you wake up and try to will yourself back into a dream, you wait for a story that won’t return? He watched the world through the rain. He’d gone someplace else, someplace far, when someone clamped his elbow and squeezed it—hard.

  “Nellie! Where’s your bonnet?”

  “Leah Harvey?”

  The two of them stood in the rain and talked for a few moments before parting. Popper pretended not to look her over as he looked her over. He coughed into his hand and peeked. A squat woman in a pinstripe suit, no makeup on her healthy red cheeks. Squat but not unstately, Marthalike in her poise, in her direct stare. She stood her ground on the sidewalk. People didn’t jostle Leah Rosencrantz, they arced around her. She looked Popper over and didn’t pretend not to. Found him barely passable. He felt a dig of lust pierce his gut.

  The years have ground the Rosencrantzes down to a more Popperish size. Like their father before them, they are lawyers in this city. Leah does estate planning, which was what Hal did after Abrahamson and Smoot collapsed in the mid-nineties. Eli’s a junior partner at Rothstein, Korshak, and Preskill. Neither Leah nor Eli has become as successful as their father in his heyday. At what point do we become our limitations?

  Alexander Popper? He works for the Cook County Public Defender, where he handles mostly misdemeanor cases, petty vandalism, petty theft, trespassing, an occasional assault and battery, a little drunk and disorderly, some moral turpitude. Nothing he couldn’t imagine himself committing on a bad day. He’s always felt most at home around the guilty. But even guilt’s no requirement. All that counts is to be accused.

  All these years and they’ve never run into each other on the street.

  “I’ve got a daughter now,” he said.

  “I know. Your mother told my mother. Mazel tov.”

  “They talk?”

  “Why not? See you, Nellie. I’ve got a hearing.”

  Popper waved. Leah waved. They both crossed the street at the same time. There was that weirdness that happens after you’ve said goodbye to someone but you are both still walking in the same direction.

  “Well.”

  “Well.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Right. So long.”

  Popper stopped in the middle of the intersection and scratched the underside of his knee. He watched her stomp down LaSalle with the rest
of the crowd. All the umbrellas like bobbing mushrooms. In the rain, in Chicago, everybody looks alike. Popper, baffled by the ruthless piling of the years, gazes up at the Board of Trade, looming at the end of the block like a giant stopper. They don’t call this the Loop for nothing. Loop, deloop, deloop. Here I am myself again. Nobody as exiled as people who never leave home. He’s got a pre-trial conference for a shoplifting case in an hour. The defendant stole eight perfume bottles from Field’s. (“Why eight?” Popper had asked. “They were on sale,” she said.)

  Hey, Leah, you want to grab a beer sometime?

  FROM THE NAVAL LIBRARY OF SEYMOUR POPPER

  GUN SAFETY PRECAUTIONS

  1. Never point a rifle or pistol at anyone you do not intend to shoot.

  —Bluejackets Manual, page 102

  105 RIPARIAN LANE

  I’ll sue you for libel.”

  “Wouldn’t it be slander? I haven’t written anything. It’s only a verbal accusation, and it’s not even an accusation. I’m only asking you.”

  They’re on the back patio. Philip is on his knees, weeding along the low wall where some years he grows long-stem roses. Beside his knees is a tall glass of iced tea with a floating lemon wedge. He tugs up another weed, long, dirty-rooted, and tosses it to Popper.

  “Throw it in the basket, will you?”

  “Come on, it was a long time ago. No harm, no foul. Statute of limitations. Did you rob the White Cedar apartment?”

  His father used to say phooey when he got angry. Leo and Popper have lampooned this for years. It always came out fast, in a rush of spit, more like Fwi! Fwi! Fwi! But Philip’s calm now. He only says, “Enough with the goddamn law. I’m tired of it. I’m going to give it up in three years. Now I just want to garden.”