Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  “Why would I be?” I said.

  “Aren’t I some kind of freak?”

  “You work in a dentist’s.”

  She stared at me directly, as if deciding whether to laugh. She seemed to decide in favor of it, but by then it was too late. She picked up her book and started reading again. Why did she summon me? Because I was a remnant? A token of a vanished time when even shopping for stuffed animals meant some kind of hold in the world?

  The basement door opened. I listened to my grandfather’s heavy, careful steps as he descended. He didn’t have much time left himself. We were becoming a family of tatters. Three months after Esther’s funeral, my grandmother came home and found him toppled over on the floor of the study. The paramedic said the attack was so massive he hardly could have felt anything at all. Like being blindsided by a bus, the paramedic said. Why is this always the measure? As if the absence of suffering in someone’s final moments somehow cancels—

  Happy Father’s Day 1977, Happy Father’s Day 1978.

  When he knocked on the door, and even after he spoke, “But, darling, isn’t there anything at all you need?” I didn’t answer, either. And then Esther did laugh, not out loud, to herself. My grandfather didn’t knock again. He stood outside the door for a couple of minutes before going back upstairs.

  Uncle Norm Reads Spinoza as His Cookie Business Collapses Due to the Rise in Sugar Prices in the Dominican Republic

  For a long time, from the early ’50s to the middle ’70s, it was a good business. He supplied cookies to 4-H Clubs nationwide. They weren’t high-end cookies. They were basic cookies, simple vanilla wafers, nearly tasteless, but a cookie is a cookie, and even a bland one still has a certain joy in it. Alf Dolinsky sold floor coverings. Teddy Wolfson was in the plate-glass business. Sy Kuperchmid and his brothers exported umbrellas. Freddy Weissman made a fortune in hats. Irv Friedman, notebook rings. Notebook rings, in those days you could make a fine living selling notebook rings. Barry Gitlin sold zippers. Walt Kaplan, furniture and home appliances. Hal Hodash, sweaters, men’s coats, and outerwear. Kermit Baumgartner, aluminum siding. They were Fall River men. They dealt in tangibles. Some businesses went bust; others lasted generations. Norm Litwak made cookies, and a man who produces cookies God smiles on, at least for a while.

  All bodies are in motion or at rest.

  A reader, Uncle Norm lamented, without ever saying it out loud, never having gone to college. College wasn’t done. Not then. At twenty-one, he was already a married man with a daughter. Not that he had any illusions about what he might have learned had he gone. Norm prided himself on being a self-taught pointy-head. His office above the factory floor was stuffed with books. He’d often stay late, his feet on an open desk drawer, his glasses shoved up his forehead because he was both near- and farsighted and needed bifocals but had never bothered to buy a pair. Plus, he liked the smell of paper up close like that. He’s up there now, having sent everyone home early. It’s March of ’76. The Herald News is on the floor. Enough with the news. Sugar’s quadrupled. He’s doomed. What else is there to know? He’ll be lucky to make it through the month. He can’t go home to Ida, not yet. She’ll read the ruin on his face, and Ida’s never been one to accept that ruin’s the only constant there is and that unruin is snow in a Fall River August. So you can’t call the end of a near miracle—twenty-odd years afloat in a fickle business—a catastrophe. Ruin, Ida, did you really think it wasn’t out here waiting for us?

  Bodies are individual things which are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, and so each body must be determined to be in motion or at rest by another thing, namely, another body.

  He knows he should be postulating upon practical considerations. Sugar and price and volume; credits, debits, and payroll. What Spinoza would call substances. All of which are part of an integrated system. Proving, by the way, in this particular case, that a little island in the Caribbean can reach out and plunk an inconsequential entrepreneur in southeastern Massachusetts right in the nose. Instead, he thinks of Ida sleeping, never at rest, always in motion. For Ida, sleeping is only a brief cessation of purposefulness, not anything resembling repose. Norm thinks of how some nights she sprawls across to his side of the bed, nearly touching him. Other nights she balls herself up so tight you’d think she was trying to vanish. And sometimes when he reaches for her it’s as if she feels his touch ahead of his fingers, as if the slow movement of his hand creates wind and that wind breathes in her ear before even skin meets skin. Not a recoil—just a hardly perceptible edging away. But other other nights, it’s as if she has a little room to spare, and she takes his reaching hand and pulls, yanks, him to her side and almost simultaneously into her, hurried but unhurried, now, and there is no time anymore so now could be yesterday, tomorrow, next week, and it’s as Spinoza says, they merge, two unrelated things, substances, bodies in motion, together, yes, one, God and nature, everything and anything. And the rabbis said you didn’t believe. Wasn’t the problem that you believed too much? That our own standing as part of an integrated universe not only allows us but, by singular divine fiat, compels—induces—us to connect, to merge, to unify—

  Am I even close, Baruch? That every bit is the whole, that every occurrence—

  No, they weren’t great cookies, but it was a living. The moment he walks in the door, she’ll read his face. Out the grimy little window, he looks down on the shop floor. Lining the far wall are boxes waiting to be shipped. He’ll break the news tomorrow or the day after.

  They’ll go idle in three weeks, maybe he can stretch it out to a month. Reduce to a skeleton crew. Friedman might take a few of his people. And he’s already talked to Walt about Clarence, because he used to be a reupholsterer. Then, eventually, it will be just him and Sheila keeping vigil over the machines he might still be able to sell. The rest, scrap. He’ll give up the lease, pay the penalty for early termination. (Talk to Plotkin, possible to write that off?) And then?

  Well, nature and God don’t cease over the early termination of a lease. And consider that all the ways in which a body is affected by another body follow from the nature of the affected body. As if it is the affected body itself that determines, invites—

  Tonight, maybe, he’ll reach for her. And maybe his hand will stop short before she can feel its wind and so remain, for the moment, an unaffected body, separate, contained, alone.

  But another night—tomorrow night, or the night after—

  Bernard: A Character Study

  They found my mother’s first cousin frozen in a rented cabin up in New Hampshire, not far from where he’d gone to prep school. A smart kid, Bernard enrolled at Harvard on a math scholarship in the fall of 1973. This was after his father, Uncle Horace, was busted for running a scam with his brother, Bernard’s uncle, and their “investment firm” went belly-up. (The brother promptly shot himself.) But for the money the two brothers hadn’t managed to con out of my grandfather, Horace might have gone to jail. My grandfather used his savings to pay the lawyers. Bernard was Uncle Horace and Aunt Josephine’s only child. That he still made it to Harvard (Horace’s alma mater), he was that much of a genius at math, was supposed to be the redemption of that side of the family. If Bernard made good, something might be said for disgrace. Harvard!

  But LSD. It was the LSD Bernard took at Harvard, the family has always said, without evidence, that doomed him. Because wasn’t the stuff everywhere? Wasn’t Cambridge crawling with LSD in the ’70s? They grew it in labs and doled it out to kindergartners. Bernard dropped out of Harvard, or was thrown out, midway through his second year and returned to Fall River, where he hung around for the next thirty years, clawing out a living selling ads for the Herald News.

  I always had a soft spot for Bernard because he was kind to my grandmother. After my grandfather died, Bernard would drive her to the Peoples Drug or Almacs for groceries, or to a hair appointment. When I’d see him in person, it always cost me: a ten or a twenty, whatever I had in my wallet.r />
  Bernard had a great talent for falling in love. There were at least two official marriages and one recognized by Massachusetts common law. There were (at least) three kids, one adopted son and two daughters of his own, and, as a result, multiple court orders mandating support he could never pay in full or on time. Even so, Bernard was a doting father, or at least tried to be, and he scuttled all over southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island trying to hold things together, which was impossible because there wasn’t anything to hold together. There were only scattered families he’d had a hand in creating, but which had, as soon as he was out of the daily picture, naturally moved on without him.

  If not for the job at the Herald News he wouldn’t have had much of anything at all, and as it was he was constantly hard up. And yet: imagine young Bernard and his bevy of cousins, my mother included, prancing around Uncle Horace and Aunt Josephine’s place in Mattapoisett back when not only wasn’t the money tainted, it flowed, gentle, like the Mattapoisett River flowed into Buzzards Bay. The family frolicked in that cash for years. And think of Bernard, at fifteen, lanky in his suit and clip-on tie, leaving home for Phillips Exeter. And see him? In the fall of ’73, in the aftermath of his uncle’s suicide and all that subsequent public humiliation, Horace in the papers, and still Bernard marching, head held high and jammed with algebra so advanced it no longer had anything to do with numbers or even symbols that represent numbers, straight into Harvard Yard, having made it there not because of but in spite of his father.

  Bernard was a monumentally shitty driver, and when he drove my grandmother to the drugstore, she’d always clamp her eyes shut and pray to the God she’d never had much use for that they’d make it to the store in one piece, and Bernard would say, “Aunt Sarah, open your eyes and live a little,” as the car careened down Robeson Street like they were escapees. Because Bernard always drove, walked, ran, as though he’d just scaled a wall or climbed a fence and might as well live it up on the lam while he still had the chance. Even if he was only on the run from his cubicle at the Herald News or his hardly furnished one-bedroom in Globe Corners, or on account of one of his exes sending the law to hound him over unpaid support—he was always in motion.

  He used to call my mother, 3:00 a.m. Chicago time. Just want to talk, Miriam. You can take your wallet out of your nightie. Though, in the morning, if you want to Western Union a contribution to save my ass, my ass would appreciate it. But really, truly, at the end of the day, it wasn’t money. What he wanted was to indulge in some mutual memory from their childhood, and he’d say: Remember when little cousin Jacob bled to death in the kitchen on Woodlawn Street? Who knew we had royal blood in the family? And my mother would say, Bern, you weren’t even born when Jacob, there’s no way you could have—

  “You wouldn’t think a kid so small could have so much blood. Niagara Falls. You think it’s true about Molly and Max?”

  And my mother would respond in a whisper as if her own dead mother could hear the betrayal from the grave: “Those two did have the same-shape heads.”

  Because even in the ’80s it was still an illicit story, that dark old chestnut about my mother’s (and Bernard’s) grandparents being first cousins. The hemophilia being prima facie evidence. The fact that I just let this out without being struck by lightning is a testament to how even the most closely held family taboos dissolve eventually into only words. Bernard especially liked the moral of the story—how the curse was visited on an innocent seven-year-old—because above all he considered himself the family truth teller. He took pride in always being willing to say what nobody else ever would. The man was a champion liar, but he could tell the truth like nobody’s business. It was the only currency he ever had in abundance. Of his father, Horace, a man he dearly loved—Bernard was a man who loved generously, fiercely, all over the place—he used to say that by the time he was old enough to crawl into his old man’s lap, he knew his father was a charlatan. “Beware of any man who walks around calling himself a philanthropist. Philanthropist isn’t a job, it’s a cover story.”

  I’ve no idea how Bernard survived after he finally got canned by the Herald News. He lived another seven or eight years. Eventually he was so broke he couldn’t live in Fall River, which Bernard would have been the first to say is saying something. He loved his city as only a native could. He knew the streets, the potholes. He knew the hills, seven of them, just like in Rome. Bernard knew where the falls and the river that gave the city its name were hiding beneath the rubble of the now long-defunct mills. And if Fall River was getting shabbier, it was all right with Bernard. Unlike Providence, unlike Boston, Fall River no longer had an overpompous block on its map. Even the Highlands, where the mill owners built their mansions, weren’t stuck-up anymore. Fall River made no effort to reconcile its present degradation with its once-glorious past. That’s honest. And as a Jew in a Catholic city, Bernard would always be, no matter his knowledge, no matter his affection, a little at arm’s length. But even this felt right. Fall River was home, but it never fully embraced you. That’s honest, too. When Bernard returned from Harvard after a year and a half, only about an hour and change away, his city took him back, mostly. What’s one more loser? Three more decades he lived there. Until even Fall River couldn’t sustain him anymore.

  The last time he called my mother, Bernard said he’d started a T-shirt and screen-printing business. No hard sell, he just wanted her to know, in case she wanted in on the ground floor. She’d see a return of something like 200 percent on her initial investment within just a few months because, Mirry, hear me out, I’ve already got more preorders than I can handle.

  I don’t know if it was the cold that killed him in the rented cabin or whether he froze only after whatever else got him first. I have no way of knowing. I’m sure there’s a death certificate on file somewhere in New Hampshire, and I could probably go up there and cajole it out of a somnolent clerk on the grounds of being an interested cousin. Which wouldn’t be true, though I am—was—a cousin. A second cousin once removed? Removed from where? A third cousin? But my point is, no, I don’t want to make a point. I only want to repeat what you already know. That there isn’t any limit to how far a person can fall in America.

  How do you explain a life like Bernard’s? Pretend that it was any single incident, or chain of incidents, that finally did him in? Go chronologically from the time his father and uncle were busted for a racket through each of Bernard’s three or four wives? Why invent a timeline when every day the man managed to get out of bed and smile at the world—and he did smile, Bernard smiled all the time—was only another day closer to the day the landlord in New Hampshire found him in that unheated cabin after ten days because the rent was late? The smile must have been a mask, but there was, also, it’s true, something frantically happy about Bernard. I think he woke up every day and thought, Today I’ll catch a break. I can see him ginning himself up in the mirror: Got a few irons in the proverbial fire, something might pay off, I can feel it. And in the afternoon, I’ll go and visit the girls, Kate in Brockton, Debbie in Seekonk. And tomorrow, Saturday, I’ll take Jeff for French toast at HoJo’s.

  Because being broke, Bernard would be the first to tell you, is different from being poor. Broke signifies the possibility of becoming rich or, as in Bernard’s case, rich again. Broke is temporary, subject to interpretation, fluid. Broke’s always got a bright side.

  He was the tallest member of the family on record. His parents were tiny human beings. Horace was squat and puckery. Josephine was wispy, doll-like, elegant. Bernard was a beanstalk who even in his teens towered over them. He was also the only one in the extended family with curly hair, a great mass of chaotic hair that rained dandruff. He’d be having lunch with my grandmother at the China Express in the strip mall by the industrial park and he’d say, “Holy shit, Aunt Sar, it’s snowing in my wonton soup.”

  And there were the two large blue-black bowls under his exhausted eyes.

  When Bernard returned to Fall River in
1975, Uncle Horace wouldn’t speak to him. Since most people in town weren’t speaking to Horace, he’d ripped that many people off, it must have made him feel better that there was someone left he could give the silent treatment. I think that for Horace, failure in business, even if that failure was caused by deliberately orchestrated financial crimes, was a whole different deal than what he would have considered “personal” failure. A man taking drugs when he wasn’t sick? Wrecking a head for numbers that could have led God only knows where? Courting ruin from within when things were hard enough without? It would have made no sense to Horace. After Aunt Josephine’s death, though, as he became increasingly frail, Horace had no choice but to allow his son to drive him to the pharmacy and to the doctors. And eventually it was Bernard who packed his father off to the Jewish Home for the Aged. It was Bernard who carried his father’s few boxes of effects—all that was left—and stacked them neatly in a corner of Horace’s final small room.

  “It’s a cell,” Horace said.

  “Looks like it,” said Bernard, who’d known one or two.

  He was forty-eight when they found him. The Fall River Philanthropic Burial Society, an organization that has been burying Fall Riverites for the last 140 years, buried Bernard next to his mother in 2004.

  On the gate in front of Beth El Cemetery, there’s a plaque with a Talmudic poem on it:

  The world is like

  A vestibule before

  The world to come;

  Prepare thyself in

  The Vestibule that

  Thou mayest enter

  Into the hall.

  I’ve stood at the cemetery gate and read this poem many times. Every time I visit my dead, I copy it down into whatever notebook I’m carrying. I’m drawn to this idea of the world as a vestibule, which I think of as a place to take off your boots: a mudroom. I doubt that Bernard made it into the hall, but it wasn’t for lack of being busy in the vestibule. And who knows? Maybe this is what the rabbis mean by preparing thyself. Keep hustling. You’d see Bernard loping up South Main, that wild bramble of hair sticking out in every direction, from Columbia to Pocasset Street, heading for the Herald News, with great purpose and speed, as if, as I say, he wanted to put as much distance as possible between where he was going and where he was coming from. But the man couldn’t go three feet without being hailed like a taxi. The deputy mayor, Lucille who worked at the Dunkin’ Donuts, a cop, a junkie, some half-dead elder who knew his father from the chamber of commerce, the sexy librarian who drove in from Bristol, Rhode Island, the cashier at the savings and loan, Josiah Nadley who owned the comic-book/smutty-magazine store at 803 South Main.