by Peter Orner
And Mr. Henry waits, twin towels folded over his arm.
Visions of Mr. Swibel
For years, first under the old man, and then under Mayors Mike Bilandic and Jane Byrne, Charles Swibel was chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. A rich real-estate developer, the fox in charge of the henhouse. Yet this was Chicago, and nobody but the reformers much blinked. And who ever listened to the reformers—background noise of a majestic city?
You hear something?
No, what?
I dunno, voices crying injustice in the dark?
Go buy some earplugs.
Through the ’70s my father was a rising young lawyer who, among other things, represented the CHA in tort cases. When a resident got hurt at the Robert Taylor Homes or Cabrini-Green or Stateway Gardens and sued the city, my father defended the CHA. Often he argued successfully that though the stairwell was unlit or the elevator out of order, the plaintiff, having lived in the building for such and such amount of time, certainly should have been familiar with this particular hazard and therefore was, at the very least, partially responsible for their own injury. He saved the city millions. And my father, standing in his thirty-second-floor LaSalle Street office, used to tell my brother and me, “If I don’t do it, take a look down there at this block of hustlers who will.”
So it was a good contract, and eventually my father became personally close to the CHA chief, Mr. Charles Swibel himself. My father revered men of action. And Swibel, who strode around with a tall and wispy head of hair like Liberace and a gold watch that must have weighed twenty pounds, impressed my father as the genuine article. A Churchill, a MacArthur, a Stalin, a Daley. Of course, he knew that mucky-mucks had been accusing Swibel for years of draining the coffers of the CHA for his own gain. But my father was an attorney, a servant of the law. His professional responsibility was to represent clients, and one of his clients was the Chicago Housing Authority. By then the CHA not only was being sued by individuals but was also the subject of massive class actions, and my father was in the thick of it. I remember I’d go to lunch with him at the Standard Club, and the maître d’ would approach and say, “A call for you, sir. Would you like to take it at the table?” My father would nod, and a waiter would carry the phone to him on a tray, the long cord snaking behind him like a tail, the receiver resting beside the phone, and you could already hear Mr. Swibel’s voice rumbling. My father would pick up the phone and listen until the rumbling subsided and say, “Understood, Chuckie, understood.” Then he’d hang up, and the waiter would return and retreat, silently, walking backward, with the phone on the tray. It was an amazing thing: my father calling Mr. Swibel “Chuckie.” The man was a kind of subgod, a personal friend of Mayor Daley’s. Daley was dead by then, but that didn’t matter. He ran Chicago from the grave—he had a switchboard down there and everything—and one of the people he talked to every day was Charles Swibel.
And once he came out to our house in Highland Park. Mr. Swibel actually lived in another suburb, Winnetka, a rich Jew among rich Gentiles (far enough away so that Cabrini-Green might as well have been in Delaware), but Highland Park, just a little farther up the North Shore, where mostly rich Jews lived among other mostly rich Jews, was a bridge too far. Hadn’t he slogged his balls off to make it to Winnetka? Hadn’t his own father washed up in Chicago from the Pale of Settlement in rags? To Mr. Swibel, those few miles north to where Jews still huddled together (while pretending not to) must have been tantamount to slumming it.
Whatever he’d had to say that morning apparently couldn’t wait and couldn’t be conveyed over the phone. It was Sunday. We were having breakfast. My mother was looking out the window. She was, I remember, always looking out the window in those days, as if visualizing escape.
“There’s a car in the driveway,” my mother said without interest.
“What car?” my father said.
“A big car.”
“A Lincoln Town Car?”
My mother shrugged. “It’s a big car, Phil.”
“Is it a butter-yellow Lincoln Town Car?”
That my mother didn’t tell him to get up and look for himself is an indication of where things stood in our house in the early ’80s. She didn’t bother to speak to my father any more than absolutely necessary. Words were energy, and she was storing them up for another life.
“What make of car is it, Miriam?”
“It’s yellow, but I have no idea—”
My father sprinted up the stairs three at a time. He must have had his suit and tie on in less than forty-five seconds. There wasn’t enough time for all of us to be made presentable, but even so my father ordered my brother and me (he knew my mother would silently refuse) out to the driveway immediately. “Just wave discreetly,” he said. “Do not approach the Lincoln.”
And so that’s what we did. My brother and I stood there in the driveway and waved discreetly to Mr. Swibel, or at least to the tinted window that he was purportedly behind. The engine of the Lincoln was purring low. My father, with a humble unfolding of his arm, presented us to the tinted window. It slowly descended to reveal a man in large sunglasses and a bouffant. He lifted a beringed hand languidly in our direction. Nice-looking brood. My father approached the car and for a few moments stood in audience before we heard him say, “Understood, Chuckie, understood.” But Mr. Swibel wasn’t through. He spoke for another five minutes, and then, without waiting for my father to say whether he understood or not, slowly began to back the Lincoln up. While in reverse, Mr. Swibel never took his eyes off my father. I remember being impressed that he could drive backward without taking hold of the passenger’s seat and craning his neck to look out the rear window. My father stood and watched, mesmerized. Admiration at that level is a form of love, isn’t it? A man’s got to love something, doesn’t he? Mr. Swibel withdrew like the tide, and even after he was gone, my father remained there in the driveway looking at the gravel, at the tracks made by the yellow Lincoln, amazed and bereft at the same time.
The Laundry Room
1. The Little Buddha
When my brother lost the election for sophomore class vice president, he smashed the little porcelain Buddha my grandfather had given him for good luck. The figure had a smoothish belly I liked to rub. When my brother threw him on the laundry-room floor, the little Buddha shattered into so many pieces that years later we were still finding traces of his remains. At night, with the light off, with a flashlight, you could always find tiny specks. Apparently, he was worth a lot of money. My grandfather had brought him back from Tokyo after the war and had been holding on to him, waiting for an occasion to bestow the sacred Buddha upon his eldest grandchild. And when he did, it was with a great deal of solemn ceremony.
A few days before the election, my grandfather, sitting behind his enormous slab of desk, had called my brother and me into his study. My brother must have thought he was getting a Cross pen or something. The little Buddha was squatting in the dead center of the great desk, emanating serenity and wisdom. We’d never seen the Buddha before, and we’d searched my grandfather’s drawers hundreds of times. (I was especially drawn to what he called his French postcards, topless women posing like kittens.) When my brother and I were settled and attentive in the two chairs before him, my grandfather stood up, unbuckled his belt, and loosened his pants. Then he sat down again and began speaking what I can only describe as a kind of pidgin Chinese, the voice he used when he tried to read the characters on the menu at Yu Lin’s. We laughed but stopped when my grandfather kept making those sounds in that weird high voice. He wasn’t kidding. He went on—and on—speaking this language. He seemed to be trying to entrance himself, to reach some kind of fugue state. The whole thing was freaky and unprecedented. My grandfather, a banker, wasn’t a playful person. Nor had he ever exhibited much imagination, but there he sat giving voice to the Buddha and bestowing upon my brother, through this series of oinks and dongs and ching chings, the good fortune he needed to guarantee there was no way in Nirva
na he’d lose the election.
What we’ll fall in love with enough to believe.
Debbie Swinderman was a lock. She was smart, AP this, AP that. Also, she was totally hot, had much-discussed breasts, and smiled at everybody, including losers. She had a platform that included a demand for a salad bar in the school cafeteria. My brother’s platform consisted of what? His stance on antinuclear proliferation? He put up posters around school: “Save Soviet Jewelry!” which just confused everybody. And Debbie Swinderman had an identical twin sister, Trina Swinderman, who, though not as smart (like my brother, Trina was in regular classes), was, of course, equally as totally hot. Trina smiled at losers, too. My brother considered Debbie having a twin an unfair advantage. Debbie had, in effect, not just two perfect tits to campaign with, but four. Had there been some sort of elections commission, my brother might have registered a complaint.
Instead, he relied on the Buddha. He must have known he was doomed, and yet—how often do we experience the faith of pure belief? Belief’s like catnip; once you get a whiff of it, you can’t get enough. It makes you loopy. Belief drunkens. It was as if our banker truly spoke ancient Chinese like a native and the little Buddha—
Election day. Debbie Swinderman in a landslide. She strutted across the lunchroom and gave my brother a good-sport hug, in front of everyone, pressing his humiliation into advanced-placement knockers. The lunchroom hooted.
When he got home, my brother charged down into the basement, to the laundry room. I was there. I watched. How he wrapped the little Buddha in his fist, took a running start, and hurled that little fucker—
2. Pinewood Derby
My father built my Pinewood Derby car. He spent a month on it. Our den leader, Mr. Steinhoffer, said making these cars would be a fantastic way to spend time with our fathers but, remember, fathers were not supposed to build the cars for us. It’s rule number one, Mr. Steinhoffer said, of the Pinewood Derby. You build your cars, with your dad’s kind assistance and advice, yes, but you and you alone—
My father gleefully defied this mandate.
“Mr. Steinhoffer says I have to build it myself,” I said.
“Steinhoffer?” my father said. “Steinhoffer? Who is this duty-bound Kraut?”
“He’s our den leader.”
“Den leader?”
“He leads the pack.”
“I’m thinking something along the lines of an Alfa Romeo,” my father said.
And I, equally gleefully, sat there in the laundry room beside the workbench and watched him. Not because I gave a damn about the Pinewood Derby but because not having to build it with him lessened the contact I had to have with him. As he was concentrating so intensely on his engineering, on the shape of that little slab of pinewood, we hardly spoke. And his design was innovative and aerodynamic. My car wasn’t like any other. It was flat and sleek, not bulbous. I remember watching my father dig a little groove under the car and insert a small piece of metal so our car would meet the weight requirements.
But the beauty of the car’s design didn’t make it go any faster. We came in tenth out of eleven cars. The eleventh car was disqualified on account of absence. Nate Sobel didn’t show up. Nobody bothered to suspect I hadn’t built the car myself. Other cars sped by like nobody’s business. It was as if our car had no idea it was in a race at all. The problem, Kenny Ehrenberg said, had to do with velocity. The design didn’t allow for the car to gain any momentum at the top of the track because of its lack of velocity. It had a weight on the bottom, I said.
“It’s where you put the weight that counts,” Kenny said. “You can’t just stick a weight in the bottom and expect—”
“Fuck you, Kenny.”
My father was a lawyer. What did he know about velocity?
And I remember nearly shouting at Kenny Ehrenberg, as if he’d exposed us. Listen, you blubbery dickwad, we built that car together.
3. My Father Oiling His Guns
The laundry room, its cement floor cracked from yearly floods. The single bar of fluorescent light. The string you pulled. The light would flicker and decide either to come on or not; you never knew. The washer that shook the house on spin cycle. Across from the washer, the workbench where my father oiled his guns. There were three shotguns and a little pistol he said had belonged to my great-grandmother. She’d lived in a residential hotel on the South Side. I remember her. She was always lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her helmet of steel hair could have fought in World War I.
My father, brother, and I used to hunt at a club up in Richmond, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. We were not accomplished hunters. I often tell this. Though the club stocked the fields with hundreds of pheasants, very few lost their lives to our prowess, and those that did just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But I remember fondly how, after we did manage to shoot one of them, I’d stuff the unlucky birdsoul into the inner pocket of my hunting coat, and the warmth would last so long.
My father kept the guns in a closet behind his suits. Every few months, he’d carry them down to the laundry room to be oiled. He used some special kind of oil. Linseed? And he’d sit at the workbench and regale me, if I couldn’t think of a good-enough reason I had to be elsewhere, with the virtues of keeping firearms well oiled. Or for that matter any nonautomated mechanism. You want anything to last? Oil it. I remember how he’d pour a little onto the chamois. The smell, something vinegar about it. And I remember how, as I got older, when I had the presence of mind to inhale anything that came my way, I huffed up that linseed oil because getting high on it helped me, among other things, to endure my father a few minutes longer. This, too, I’ve said before, though maybe not as directly: I shrank from my father’s physical presence. It nearly pains me to say it. Who needs this truth? The man’s gone now. It’s through, finished. What’s the point? Here is where normally I’d say, like a false prayer, something along the lines of: And my father oiling his guns in the livid laundry-room light.
As if the image of him in the basement, alone, might absolve me of beating this dead horse to death again.
Miami Beach, 1961
My parents are in a bar. My mother is twenty; my father is twenty-seven. Some local barfly starts something up with a naval officer in a gleaming white uniform. My father was in the army during the Korean War, though he never left the state of Missouri. He loathed every minute of it. Even so, there was something about the brilliance of the officer’s uniform that captivated him. Maybe it was the man’s Napoleonic epaulets, his beautiful golden shoulders. It also stands to reason that my father had had more than a few drinks by that point. Whatever it was, my father got up from the table he was sharing with my mother and clocked the barfly right off his stool. Mayhem ensues, my mother always used to say, like in a western. Tables are overturned; chairs are broken over heads. You wouldn’t think, my mother would say, that you could really break a chair over someone’s head, but you can, I saw it in person. The officer and his men whisk the newlyweds to safety out in the street. Valiant father. Beautiful mother in a yellow sundress and a wide belt with a silver buckle. The officer invites the two of them for a nightcap on the ship. And it’s on that boat, in the officer’s mess, that my parents meet the movie star Ruth Roman, a member of the officer’s party. She must have been at least fifteen years older than my mother at the time but still glamorous in a cavalier sort of way. She called everybody, even the ship’s cat, darling. She thought my young lawyer father should act. Talk about stealing the show. “Does he always break into scenes like that?” she asked my mother. “And he wasn’t even in the credits.” Ruth Roman drunk, happily drunk—they were all happily drunk—and she began to regale my parents with stories of Hollywood, where everybody behaved like cads and everybody, especially the married ones, went home lonely. My parents ate it up. Their honeymoon had a headline. Whatever happened to the naval officer, that lost Gatsby in his white uniform? Who knows? Maybe Ruth Roman married him for a while.
She used to come
visit us. She’d be in a play in Chicago. Or she’d stop in town to visit on her way to New York. She always took the train, never flew. She said she had enough unnatural disasters for one lifetime. Ruth Roman had been on board the Andrea Doria when it was hit by the Stockholm off the coast of Nantucket. My brother and I would beg her to tell us about it. How she dropped her baby in one of the last lifeboats and how that lifeboat floated away, leaving her on the deck of a ship already half swallowed by the Atlantic. “And I shouted to the waves, Go forth, little Dickie, go forth into the beyond, my boy, my progeny, good health to you and prosper, and remember, don’t fall for the first tramp that gives you a come-hither in the tall grass…”
Throughout the ’70s we’d see her, and I remember being a kid on my father’s shoulders waiting in the lobby of Union Station, waiting for her to sweep in followed by two or three porters yanking luggage carts. I’d jump down, and my brother and I would sprint toward her. My little midgets! She wasn’t anybody famous anymore. Characters, she’d say, I play characters now. Mistreated middle-aged wives, venomous mothers-in-law. Here and there, an old-maid aunt with a sense of humor. You make a living how you make a living. But her gestures were still those of a nearly A-level starlet of the ’50s. My brother and I used to watch an old VHS copy of a movie, I forget the title, where she plays a gangster’s girlfriend who poisons the gangster’s oysters. She’s in love with a guy from a rival gang or something. The scene where the gangster gags while Ruth Roman swoons in traumatized shock and horror, now that was acting.