Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  And, once, I wrote a story for Solly Hirschman under my own name. It was about a guy who’d punted for Glenbard East and gone on, in the ’70s, to appear as an extra on a few episodes of Happy Days. Now he’d come back to coach at his alma mater. Full circle, from Lombard, Illinois, to Hollywood and back to Lombard. Amazing journey! It was the kind of human-interest sidebar that no genuine sports fan would have deigned to read.

  My ex-punter was a dolt. All he wanted to talk about was how short Henry Winkler was. Like the man’s a dwarf. “Did you have any idea?”

  I told him I did have an idea.

  “You knew!”

  “That the Fonz is short? You can see it in the reruns. All you have to do is look at the heels of his boots.”

  But I got paid. Not for a score, for words. I’ve still got the clip somewhere. My mother had it framed. A few days after the story ran, Solly Hirschman called me at home.

  “There’s a man on the phone,” my mother said.

  “What man? Dad?”

  “Your father’s more of a mouse.”

  I took the receiver. One thing to call in a score and answer a few grunted questions; another for Him, unprompted, of his own volition, to pick up a phone and dial your number. Solly Hirschman had his little pixelated picture in the paper every day of every year. “Solly Hirschman on High-School Athletics.”

  “Come down and see me,” Solly said.

  “When?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, and hung up.

  I took the train downtown early the next morning. On it, I ran into my father.

  He lowered his Tribune and asked what I thought I was doing on the 7:08.

  I told him I was fulfilling my destiny. He said fair enough, so long as it didn’t cost him anything. The money he was sending my mother monthly was galling enough.

  From Union Station, I walked to the old Sun-Times Building on North Wabash. More than a block long, it used to loom over the edge of the Chicago River. In Chicago, we build to destroy. There’s a grotesque hotel there now. I found Solly in his office on the fifth floor. No light on, no window, only the blue glow of his word processor. Before I poked my head in, I took a celebratory breath. I figured he’d praise me a little, rib me a little, and give me another assignment.

  “Sit down,” Solly said.

  Behind his desk in the blue light he was all head and glasses, a life-size version of his picture in the paper. I never did get a look at the rest of his body, if he even had one. Everywhere, floor to ceiling, were stack upon stack of scores and notes on games. On his desk I was surprised to see, in the dim, a framed photograph of a little girl. The idea that Solly Hirschman had a child somewhere was difficult to believe because it would have required him, at least once, to leave this habitat. There were no chairs or anything else to sit on.

  “You don’t have any talent,” Solly said. “Your sentences are limp. You think it’s too early to tell? It’s not. Not that it matters. This building is crawling with limp sentences.”

  I waited for him to go on. He didn’t. After a while he seemed to doze off but without taking his eyes off me. I was still standing there in front of his desk when a colleague, a columnist whose face I recognized, stuck his head in.

  “He dead yet?”

  “Can’t tell.”

  “You a stringer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He say we’re all hacks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He say you got nothing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t forget.”

  The columnist laughed his way out of earshot, down the bright fluorescent hall.

  I didn’t go home right away. I stood there in Solly’s office. I’m a Jew, but I’ve always envied Catholics. They’ve got a designated place on earth to confess. The rest of us have to plead guilty to our silence, the sky, maybe a fogged-up bathroom mirror. Has there ever been a more genius invention than a wooden box you can enter, murmur a little, and, by the time you leave, you’re in the clear? A visit with God’s agent on earth and, voilà, you’re free to steal and rob and fornicate anew. Who holds the patent on confessionals? We should put one up on every corner. Solly Hirschman was a Jew, too, somewhere in there, though he’d long ago put his faith in games, in scores, in young boys, in the way they bashed into one another every fall and into the winter, in the mud, in the cold, in the snow. He was right. I could fake my way through a story, but that’s not the same as talent. I also knew it didn’t matter, that it would never matter. I was young, the owl was old, and my limp sentences were in the Chicago Sun-Times. You were dead to me, Solly, before I even left your office.

  IV

  Castaways

  Some persons are made more perfect by what befalls them, as if whatever befalls them can never make them less, can never bring them low, as it might others.

  —Gina Berriault, “The Tea Ceremony”

  Erwin and Pauline

  They found Erwin floating facedown in the Chicago River, July, everything still in heavy bloom. He’d always been considered by the family to be a bit slow. Not very slow, just a bit slow. My grandmother always said Erwin was a very “pleasant” person. He worked, for years, as a custodian at Lane Tech High School on the North Side. He was much younger than my grandfather, who had always been more of an aloof father to him than a brother. The police decided there wasn’t any foul play. It was hot the day they fished him out, over ninety. Maybe he just wanted to cool off, went one explanation. He was fully clothed, so this theory has never made much sense. Also, Erwin had never learned to swim.

  Aside from how he died, the only other surprising thing Erwin did in his life was run off with a woman and get married. They drove to Reno and came back nine days later. She was a teacher. They’d met at Lane Tech. It wasn’t that it was so shocking that she was black, though this wasn’t unshocking, either. Didn’t matter that it was the late ’60s. Chicago is Chicago, and blacks and whites, then as now, lived in mostly separate universes. It was that Erwin had found a woman at all. Let alone a pretty one who wore high heels and taught French.

  At the time they ran off together, Erwin was in his late thirties; Pauline was ten years younger. We called her Auntie Pauline because that’s what she was. Still, I remember that when she was with us, we’d repeat her name multiple times, in the most ham-handed way. Would Auntie Pauline like another drink? Auntie Pauline doesn’t want to hear that story again. How many times do you think Auntie Pauline wants to hear about the time Erwin swallowed the half-dollar? I say “we,” though at the time I couldn’t have been more than five or six. Even so, I, too, recognized the novelty of her being an official member of the family. Showing her my drawings, I’d say: Auntie Pauline, Auntie Pauline, look, my dinosaur had babies.

  When we saw her, a few holidays out of the year, she was friendly and laughed a lot. Pauline also, we noticed, touched Erwin often. He’d be sitting there in his quiet way, and she’d be next to him on the couch, casually rubbing his forearm. The family was grateful. Grateful that Erwin didn’t have to be alone anymore. We thought, What they say is true, there really is somebody for everybody. Beyond this, I don’t think any of us thought all that much about them. Some relatives hardly seem to exist beyond the periphery of the family, or maybe the truth is they don’t exist at all, on the periphery or otherwise, until they materialize on holidays, only to vanish again after a few hours.

  Erwin and Pauline lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Spaulding, just off Irving Park Road. Maybe at night they put on a little classical music. WFMT. They were happy as far as anybody could tell.

  Who knows where it went wrong, or even if it did. If we can’t pinpoint such a moment in our own lives, why should we be able to in anybody else’s? Maybe Pauline just got tired. Maybe, after a few years, it seemed like she was living with a child, because that’s what Erwin always seemed to us: a big, friendly, somewhat-slow child. They split up in ’74 or ’75. For a while Pauline continued to teach at Lane Tech. Then she moved away.
On Thanksgiving of that year, Erwin uncharacteristically made an announcement at the table. He said that Pauline had accepted a job in Michigan, at the Interlochen School for the Arts.

  “It’s very prestigious,” my grandmother said.

  “Oh, it is,” Erwin said.

  Did he hear from her? Oh, yes, Erwin said. She calls every week. He smiled in the way he did, his eyes hiding, and went silent.

  On holidays, those years after Pauline, he always let on how happy he was to see us. But you could tell he was going through the motions. Like he was indulging us, not the other way around. I think of him now, his stubble, his paunch, his sweaters with buttons, the stains on those sweaters, how he’d never look at you for more than a few seconds. He never recounted any memories himself. But when someone else told a story, he’d say, softly, I do remember that, I do. Then he’d go home and fade back into the life he lived, back to that apartment off Irving Park Road, back to his rounds at the high school. And the family remained grateful, grateful that he was still able to hold down a job, still able to care for himself. Erwin methodically moving from classroom to classroom, saying a quiet hello to a teacher working late. (Was this how he met Pauline in the first place?) A teacher who would say, Hello, Erwin. How are you? And back home again to the apartment, where he’d sit at the kitchen table and maybe read a magazine discarded by the school library. Because in the end we lacked imagination. We still lack imagination. His silence remains beyond us, the layers of it. The silence of Erwin breathing in the dark. What did we, who wouldn’t have recognized the sound of our own beating hearts, know about silence, Erwin’s or anybody’s?

  It was my grandfather who got the call. He said when he went to the Cook County morgue on Harrison Street to identify his brother, his body was swollen almost beyond recognition. “There wasn’t a sheet over him,” my grandfather said, “or anything. Isn’t there supposed to be a goddamn sheet? City of Chicago can’t afford a sheet to pull over my brother who was born here, died here?” But worse, he said, was that he immediately knew who it was. As if somewhere in the back of his mind he’d already pictured Erwin just like that, bloated, laid out on a table, prodded by strangers.

  Everybody was waiting to see if Pauline would show up for the funeral, and she did, with a small boy in tow. She wore a brown business suit and flat shoes. But she couldn’t hide that she was even more beautiful now, somehow. Maybe because I wasn’t quite a kid anymore. When she took off her glasses, her hazel eyes were wet. She wasn’t crying; it was as if she were storing up some tears for later. Wishful thinking (we pretended not to notice the ring), but we couldn’t help but believe, if only for a moment, that the boy might be Erwin’s son. A lost son we hadn’t known was lost. The math didn’t work out at all. The child was only four; she’d been gone at least a decade by then. Pauline hugged everyone—brief, efficient hugs—but they weren’t without what we believed to be a genuine squeeze of affection. The little boy was polite and shy and shook hands with everybody. The two of them didn’t come back to my grandparents’ house for cold cuts.

  Do You Have Enough Light?

  By then Esther wasn’t speaking to anyone, not my father, of course, the two hadn’t exchanged words in years, and not her parents, my grandparents, either, though now she lived in their house again. Aunt Esther was in her late forties when she moved back home. The word was that she was “a little off.” Nobody but my father went as far as to say she was crazy. He’d tell anybody who listened what a loon his sister was. That January she’d been picked up by the Chicago police in Lincoln Park whispering to trees, wearing nothing but a kimono. I’ve always remembered this, that my mother described what Esther had on that night as a kimono. I’m not sure I even knew what a kimono was, but I could see her. That gossamer dress, how it must have fluttered in the wind. The kimono incident almost had her put away. My father was certainly for it, but he lacked the authority to make it happen. Instead, my grandparents moved her into Olivia’s old room in the basement. Olivia, my grandparents’ live-in housekeeper for more than forty years, had finally retired a few years earlier and gone to live with her sister in Albany Park. Olivia’s bed was still there, as was the tall bureau. Inside one of the drawers was a pile of Olivia’s light blue uniforms. In the months after Olivia left, I remember going down there and sticking my nose in those starchy uniforms as if that bleachy smell alone could bring her back.

  Having Esther in the house must have been a comfort to my grandparents. At least now they’d be able to keep track of her. In the morning my grandmother would make Esther breakfast. She hadn’t made a meal for anybody in years, Olivia had always done the cooking, and my grandmother overdid it. For Esther, she’d make French toast, piles of sausages, lox and bagels, and a soft-boiled egg, which she’d put in one of those funny eggcups and carefully saw off the top with a knife. And she’d leave everything on the kitchen table covered by plates to keep it all hot. Then my grandmother would flee the house, not being able to bear it. A daughter who once had so much going for her. What didn’t Esther have going for her? Beauty, brains, the whole package. Hadn’t she graduated magna cum laude from Champaign?

  Esther never ate the breakfast. She’d leave for work without taking a single bite. Esther worked the whole time she lived with my grandparents. People forget this. My grandfather found her a position in a dentist’s office in Northbrook as a part-time receptionist. She could still face the world. It was her family she couldn’t stomach.

  Those were mornings of the opening and closing of doors. My grandfather would listen to the front door open and close (my grandmother) and the basement door open and close, followed by the front door once again opening and closing (Esther). Only then would he emerge from his study, where he’d been sleeping for years on the foldout couch. He was retired and occupied his time organizing his letters and photographs from the war. He’d creep into the kitchen in his socks and eat Esther’s breakfast. In part because he was famished (he was on a special diet for his heart) but also to make it look to my grandmother as if Esther had eaten. I’m not sure he ever fooled her, eating, as he did, everything in sight. My aunt, when she did eat, ate like a sparrow. And sometimes, after Esther came home from her shift at the dentist’s, but before my grandmother came home—from shopping, a luncheon, or the exercise class she taught at the rec center—my grandfather would step heavily, slowly, down the basement stairs and knock on Esther’s door and ask if she needed anything. “Another lamp, darling? Do you have enough light?” She never answered.

  They’d always been close. On a shelf in the study, next to his golf trophies, he displayed the beer steins she used to give him every year on Father’s Day. HAPPY FATHER’S DAY 1968, HAPPY FATHER’S DAY 1969, HAPPY FATHER’S DAY 1970, and so on.

  My grandfather would stand outside the door to Olivia’s old room and wait. His daughter wouldn’t answer. He’d turn and climb up the basement stairs as if from the bottom of a well.

  That year I hung out at my grandparents’ house after school. My parents had recently split up. I saw my father on Wednesday nights and every other weekend. Most weekday afternoons I’d lie on the rug in my grandparents’ living room and watch WGN on the big Zenith until my mother came and picked me up after work. On one of those afternoons, Esther rose out of the basement and asked me if I wanted to come downstairs.

  “You can wait until after the Cubs,” she said.

  Though for years Esther always made a point of buying me stuffed animals, she hadn’t acknowledged my existence since her return to my grandparents’ house.

  “I don’t give a shit about the Cubs,” I said.

  “You don’t care who wins?”

  “No.”

  I was eleven. I had my own problems. Esther stood there in the kitchen archway still wearing the skirt and blouse she’d worn to work. It was always said that Esther was too beautiful for her own good. A prophecy that proved itself to be true. What did her looks ever do for her? Old friends of hers, to this day, recognizing my name, co
me up to me and breathlessly ask, What happened? What happened to Esther Popper?

  Her glossy brunette hair piled chaotically high on her head, always a few strands dangling past her enormous, starlet eyes. About a year or so after she moved home, Esther was diagnosed with an advanced cancer and died eight months later.

  I followed her down the stairs to Olivia’s old room. I’d slept down there so many nights beside Olivia and her three cats, Henry, Harry, and Charles. The room looked the same, or as much the same as it could now that Esther was living in it. She hadn’t changed anything or put up any pictures, and she hadn’t seemed to have brought anything with her from the apartment in the city. Olivia’s small crucifix remained above the bed. Had Olivia been trying to send us some message by leaving it behind? Only the good Lord can help these people.

  Esther sat on the bed. She beckoned me to sit next to her, which I did. There was a book tented on the comforter. What I’d give now to know what book it was. My grandparents’ house has long been torn down and all the contents sold or scattered.

  Esther reached and picked up a bottle on the nightstand. “Excedrin?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She popped a couple of pills in her mouth and swallowed without water. “Are you scared?” she said.