Love and Shame and Love

by Peter Orner

  “You only took Mom’s engagement ring and a ring of your grandmother’s that Grandbean gave Mom when you guys got married.”

  Philip took a sip of tea.

  “More lies, lies upon lies.”

  Popper thinks of the way his father used to comb his hair for him when he refused to do it himself, mashing the teeth of the comb across Popper’s scalp. He’s never used a comb since. And he thinks, though later he will not even admit to himself that he thought it, Who knew? Like me, true, no argument on that from me. But my father? A nobody? The garage door would begin its slow upward grind, and everybody in the house would run for cover, like it was Ahab home from the sea. Who were we running from?

  “What about the couch?”

  His father’s face doesn’t move, but his hands dig deeper into the soil.

  “What couch?”

  “Upstairs in the TV room. The green couch. When you threw Mom—”

  “Is this an ambush? You come here after how many months of not setting foot? Is it a year now? You live a half hour away. I see my own granddaughter, what, every six months? And this is what you come to talk about?”

  “Ella doesn’t like the suburbs. She cries the entire ride out here.”

  “I did not rob your mother’s apartment, and I certainly never threw her on any couch.”

  Nothing has changed, nothing has ever changed. The fountain still burbles, the turtle still drools. The turtle will never stop drooling. And the boy holding him? Popper wonders if there really is a dick under there or if the sculptor put a leaf to cover up only what people would expect needed covering up.

  “Do you still hate Hal Rosencrantz?”

  “Hal? He’s dead, leave him be. Leave us all be.”

  “I mean, you two were pretty close friends, so it must have—”

  “Alex, in those years everybody was sleeping with everybody. And don’t kid yourself, everybody is always sleeping with everybody. Your mother and I, that wasn’t our problem. Forget Hal Rosencrantz. Miriam and I had zero in common. Any idiot could have seen that a mile away. What’s the big story?”

  His father’s hair is thinner now and wispy. The wind makes it flap upward, as if it’s hinged.

  “I’m only trying to build a record.”

  Philip stands and leans toward him and nearly gently kisses Popper’s neck.

  “You’re building ruins.”

  TO: Ella

  FROM: Your Father

  RE: Questions of Cowardice

  When I’m not with you I spend a lot of my day thinking about things that happened before you even existed. I much prefer this to actually working.* A few years ago I got mugged. I was riding on the path through Lincoln Park by the lake and a guy—he wasn’t much more than a kid—jumped out from behind one of those cement planters and knocked me off my bike. This was the second time in my life that happened to me. The other time I was little and on my way to your Uncle Manny’s. I was as scared a few years ago as I was when I was six. So this kid knocks me off and takes my bike and rides away down the path. The sort of thing I deal with every day at work. Assault and battery. Class 2 robbery (unarmed). I pretended to chase him. Later, I told people he had a knife to make the story better. He didn’t. He was able to take my bike because he scared the hell out of me. I’m not sure if this makes me a coward. Maybe it does. But also, it’s true, I’ve never much believed in chasing people. Nobody is more determined than a person running away. This is about the only thing I know for certain. Your mother wanted something else. She wasn’t sure what, but she wanted something else. Nothing in your nature suggests that you will ever blame her. Nor do I think you’ll ever blame me for not trying harder to change her mind. But we do tend to judge our fathers. For what exactly, we don’t always even know.

  IN THE NEW HOUSE

  In the kitchen of the new house on Ridge Road, west of the highway. Years since they sold the 38 Sylvester Place house and still they call it the new house. Nobody ever remembers the address. Only that it’s a block off Lake Cook Road, near Northbrook Court. Maroon brick house, white roof.

  The two of them, two cups of cold Folgers, the afternoon light slowly retreating, a deer idly munching the brown grass in the little backyard.

  “It’s time I told you,” Bernice said. “We invented the spiral notebook.”

  “Say again?”

  “My father. At our kitchen table in 1919. I was standing by his elbow when it finally worked. He’d been at it for years and years. The man was a real perfectionist. One day he did it. He invented the spiral notebook. But a cousin, a lawyer by the name of Gus Hirsch, tricked him out of the patent. Never trust a lawyer, even if you’re related, especially if you’re related.”

  “Granbean, walk three feet in this family and you step on a lawyer.”

  Bernice swatted the air. “I’m talking about my own father. I’m talking about Slanskys, not Poppers. Imagine the money! Every time anybody in the universe buys a spiral notebook, we’re supposed to make at least three and a half cents on the dollar. I choreographed a little dance in my father’s honor. The Notebook Dance. I wish I remembered it.”

  It could even be true. Popper’s great-grandfather Louie was a bookbinder, this much is certain. Popper has in his possession an Illinois Blue Book from 1922. Slansky Brothers, Printers, 148 Monroe St., Chicago. There’s only one surviving photograph of the man. In it he is standing alone, a big-eared, scrunch-faced man with small hands that he is holding out in front of him like these empty hands are all he has to offer. Think of the man sitting at the kitchen table tinkering (years of him sitting at that kitchen table tinkering) with wire and paper. Tinkering and tinkering until one day, voilà—How do you say voilà in Yiddish?—you can turn the page and turn the page! Hey, Louie, call a lawyer. You ought to get a thing like this patented. What about Gus? Isn’t Gus Hirsch a lawyer? The rest being history, their history, the only thing that can’t be ripped off by an unscrupulous cousin.

  “But complain?” Bernice says. “Complain? My father? He loved this country even if it didn’t make him rich. He was a simple man. He thought there was more to life than the money he’d never have. He’d come home from the bindery, collapse in his chair. I’ve never seen tiredness like my father’s tiredness. My mother—she’d complain, she was the one who complained. Yes, she wanted something better, always something better, but there wasn’t a day she didn’t bring him a bowl of warm water to soak his hands in when he came from work. He’d walk around the house with bandaged hands, pretending to be a boxer, my little father.”

  The light in the kitchen fades. Neither of them bothers to flip the switch. They are no longer in the not-so-new house on Ridge Road, this house they never look at, never remember, but instead are back on Sylvester Place. Seymour coughs in his study. He’s reading. In the den with the big picture window the TV talks to no one. The living room remains an unsealed tomb. His grandmother, her hair—still beauty-shop perfect. Her face, her wartime starlet eyes.

  “Enough about me. What about you? Anybody new on the horizon?”

  “Nobody much.”

  “How’s Ella?”

  “She wants a dog, a big one, a St. Bernard.”

  “Get her a stuffed one. Bring her next time. I promised her I’d teach her to pirouette.”

  “I will. How come you’ve never liked dogs? Something happen when you were small or something? Did you get bit during the Depression or something?”

  “Talk about you. You’re suffering?”

  “No, I’m not suffering. Who said I was suffering?”

  “Right, because there’s suffering and there’s suffering, and you know the difference. You’ve told me. They suffer in India. A little, you’re suffering a little? From your divorce?”

  “We never got married.”

  “Good for you. Who needs it?”

  “Anyway, it’s been almost three years now. I’m fine. How can we get some of this spiral notebook loot?”

  “You call three years ‘years’?
”

  “What do you call them?”

  “Pinpricks, Alexander.”

  “It’s true, days feel swallowed sometimes. I mean Ella, seeing Ella, but—”

  He stops, shrugs. They both look away from each other and try to find some place in this near-empty kitchen to moor their eyes. Popper looks out the curtained window; Bernice at the digital clock. 6:37.

  “You’ve always been sad. Even as a boy you were sad.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re letting your hair grow a little. That’s good. You’ve lost some weight.”

  “I have?”

  “Roll up your sleeves. Let me see the backs of your arms.”

  “All right.”

  “Dry, always so—Seymour always said that even men—”

  “I know, I know.”

  October 5, 1945

  And now for the big news—You can step up and call me Captain—captain of an overwith war—I took over command yesterday when the skipper finally got relieved to go home—He was such a nervous wreck, another day on this boat and we would have had to carry him off—For the last few months he couldn’t eat anything without having violent gas pains—So yesterday we had to close out all the books and records and change command, which is just like closing a million-dollar deal—But it’s you, Beanie, who deserves the promotion to Chief House Frau—You’ve proved yourself a whole lot better than the common clay through this entire ordeal—

  BROOKS BROTHERS AFTERNOON

  Philip roams Brooks Brothers like a leopard in his own jungle. This particular hue of blue all his. Today, though, he’s not on the prowl. He’s come in for—

  What has he come in for?

  A suit salesman gradually approaches. He’s got a pronounced limp that makes him sway from side to side as he moves soundlessly across the thick carpet. Longish face. Eyes set forward in his head, not quite buggy, but almost. Large fleshy nose. Not a handsome man, Philip thinks. Yet not without dignity in his homeliness. Old, though, very old, even too old to be selling suits. Wonder where Charlie is.

  “What can I do for you, Counselor?”

  “How did you know I was an attorney?”

  “You have that look about you. A man in charge. Important affairs. A briefcase full of secrets. What’s on your mind today, sir?”

  Philip’s not sure what to say. I’ve only come here for refuge. How would this sound? He stares at the unfamiliar salesman. The salesman looks for a moment at Philip’s cordovans, then back at Philip’s face, as if he’s begun to understand. His eyes moisten slightly. There is comfort in our blueality. I know it. You know it. Nothing to be ashamed of. Here the harshness of the world is lessened.

  “Where’d you get the limp?” Philip says.

  “Born with it,” the salesman says.

  “Oh,” Philip says. He’d like to lean up against the false mahogany and whistle. Just passing the time. “So you weren’t in the war?”

  “No.”

  “My father was in the South Pacific. Saw action at Okinawa. Terrible scene. Lucky he didn’t get his head shot off.”

  The salesman nods respectfully. The store is mostly empty. A couple of younger salesmen murmur to each other in the back. No sign of Charlie.

  “So,” Philip says, setting his briefcase on the carpet. “How’s the spring line?” Again as one Brooks man to another. He only wants to talk a little shop with someone on the inside.

  “Seersucker’s back,” the salesman says.

  “Again?”

  “In yellow and pale blue.”

  “Hmmmmm,” Philip says. “Hmmmm. Anything else?”

  “They’re bringing back the three-button.”

  “The three-button? When did they get rid of it?”

  “Last year. It was foolish. Last year everything was two-button with double vents.”

  Double vents. Awful. A kinsman.

  “You haven’t been here long,” Philip says.

  “No. I’ve been out in the suburbs. Transferred here last month.”

  “Transferred? Like in the Army.”

  “In a way,” the salesman says. “We are, after all, on the front line of fashion.”

  The salesman and Philip laugh together. When they stop, Philip says quietly, “It’s lonely, moving around like that?”

  He’s feeling a little wobbly. Drunkish at 4:00 in the afternoon on a Monday? Lonely? What’s he talking about?

  The salesman nods and half smiles. He doesn’t show his teeth unless he has to. Again, it’s as if he understands what Philip’s getting at in spite of the fact that Philip isn’t sure himself what he’s trying to say.

  “You get attached to a place,” the salesman says.

  “I’ve been in the same office on the sixteenth floor of the Monadnock for as long as I remember,” Philip says.

  The salesman breaks in, he can’t help himself. “I’ve worked everywhere. Southside, Northside. Northwest suburbs. I was at the Brooks in Woodfield Mall for seven years.”

  “In Schaumburg? Good God, man.”

  “At Lake Forest for another five or so. That took endurance, too.”

  “Snoots,” Philip says. “When you’re born up there, the doctor shoves a polo stick up your ass.”

  “So you know!” The salesman practically yelps.

  “Jews know all about Lake Forest.”

  The salesman rolls back on his feet and laughs harder now, and again, he and Philip—kinsmen—laugh together until neither of them is laughing anymore but they’re still laughing.

  “Not a religious man myself,” Philip says.

  “Neither me,” the salesman says. “Still, you drag it along.”

  “That’s right,” Philip says, and reaches for a display of belts hanging nearby. They look like a set of decapitated tongues. He reaches for one and fondles it. “Alligator?”

  “Cowhide,” the salesman says.

  True, Brooks has never been known for its leather. Even so, Philip thinks, you can never have enough quality belts.

  “Say,” Philip says, “what happened to dear old Charlie?”

  “Charlie Hubbard?” the salesman says. “Oh, they sent Charlie out to pasture.”

  Philip grips the belt. Charlie, who sold him his suits for decades. Stories about growing up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Always sucking a cough drop that made him slur his words when he talked. One about a boot getting lost in the muck. Having to hop back to the house on one foot. And in the spring of that year, a shoot of corn growing up out of that boot!

  He thinks of Charlie in a seersucker suit on all fours in a field munching grass. When this city’s through with you, it spits you home to Oshkosh. It’ll happen to us all. We’ve all got our Oshkoshes.

  “Oshkosh,” Philip burbles. Still wobbly.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t catch that.”

  “Oshkosh,” Philip says. “Oshkosh, Wisconsin.”

  Again the salesman nods. Again, he seems to get it. He gets Oshkosh. When the world is through with you, it spits you home to—Who is this person? Philip thinks. Philip wonders. He tries to look in the salesman’s eyes, but doesn’t get very far. It’s as if the man’s eyes are varnished over. He’s hiding somewhere in there and Philip can’t find him. Uncle Mose? But you’ve been dead a thousand years. This is all very off. We stumble from late fall to early winter. Where did that come from? Did I read it somewhere? Dizzier now, discombobulated. Brooks Brothers afternoon. Outside, the steam rises from the vents in the sidewalk, the underground boilers, a burbling cauldron beneath these streets. In here a sinkingness, a muffled feeling, not at all unpleasant. The salesman might be saying something else, but his voice is so far away now.

  NIGHT, GOLF

  He comes to him in the night and orders Popper to play golf. Recognizing the turrets of a castle rising in the distance, Popper says, “Hey, isn’t this Migweth Country Club? Why don’t you play at your own club? I thought they don’t allow Jews here.”

  “Dead ones are all right,” Seymour says
. “And I’m entitled to bring a guest.”

  “I loathe golf and everything it stands for. Do you know how many homeless people could live on a golf course?”

  “Don’t give me the business.”

  They play. Seymour tees off. Beautiful, arcing, heavenward, 250 yards at least.

  “Nice,” Popper says.

  Seymour smiles. “I’ve been playing five, six days a week lately.” He smiles some more. His teeth are very white.

  Popper tees off. Twenty-seven yards with a kerplunking divot the size of a small farm.

  “Shoulders down. Widen your stance three degrees.”

  Our dead, the distances they travel to reach us. Popper’s comes in a golf cart wearing plaid, spikes on his shoes.

  They drive, slowly, toward Popper’s ball. It’s not very far. Popper gets out again. His feet, his bare sleeping feet, sink in the soft loamish ground. It feels lovely, actually. No wonder this place is so exclusive. He hits the ball again. Maybe thirty-five yards this time. Still, Seymour doesn’t comment, nor does he question why Popper used a 9 iron when his ball is still practically on the tee. No, as they move down the fairway under the tall trees, Seymour chats. Here’s the thing, though. Seymour’s mouth moves at the wrong times. It doesn’t correspond with his actual words. It’s as though he’s been badly dubbed.

  Popper’s ball whacks a tree and flings backward for his longest shot yet, yardwise, and lands in a sand trap. Seymour is a big plaid paragon of support and patience.

  “Bravo! There’s the killer instinct!” Popper gets back in the cart. His grandfather grips him by the shoulder. “So what’s the latest?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Passed the bar and everything?”

  “Took it twice, but on the second—”

  “Marvelous!”

  “Marvelous?”

  “What else you got cooking?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”