by Peter Orner
“What time is it, Irv?”
“After four in the morning. You’ve been out eleven hours.”
“Where I was walking where?”
“That’s what I’m asking. President Avenue at two thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday. Not that I’m lording. Never once have I ever lorded. Have I, Walt? But you of all people know that a small-business owner has the right to expect an employee, even an employee as eminent as yourself, to understand that a payroll’s a payroll, and a man has to put in the time if that man expects—”
“Irv?”
“Yeah, Walt?”
“I got a view?”
“Fifth floor. The Braga Bridge will be clear as a bell in the morning. Power plant in Swansea, too.”
“What day is it?”
“Told you. Wednesday. No. Used to be Wednesday. Now it’s—”
“Do me a favor, Irv? Will you?”
“Anything, Walt. You say the word and I’ll—”
“Beat it! Will you do that for me, boss? Will you beat it?”
“Walty, I’m your brother-in-law and I love you like a brother-in-law and if you think these tears aren’t real you can fuck yourself.”
“Nurse!” What kind of hospital there’s no nurse? “Nurse!”
And it’s strange. The room begins to float a little, and Walt’s head, he’s never had a heavier head, sinks to the pillows, and again he’s pretty sure this is the end of the line, the last station, and it’s almost lovely, even if Irv Pincus is the conductor punching tickets. And yet at the same time, Irv, if he’s still in the room at all, is nothing more than a disembodied voice calling him from far away and, along with the floating, there’s an opposite feeling, a kind of tingling fallingness in his legs, his feet, his toes, like when he drinks too much coffee, a falling that doesn’t seem to land anywhere. Such delight, such ecstasy, in this falling, maybe worth your whole life, every tired morning, this moment of simultaneous floating and falling.
The Braga Bridge will be clear as a bell in the morning.
“Lazy!”
A large-headed little man in a dove-gray suit and red tie rises from the abyss at the foot of the bed. Looks like an oversize puppet. Dark eyes, large pouches underneath. You could pack a bag in those pouches. Looks like he hasn’t slept in a decade, maybe longer, but this man’s not sleepy, not at all. The man sniffs as if laziness is a smell he’s picking up on the wind.
“Poppa?” Walt says.
“Lying in bed how long? Who’s manning the store? Didn’t I tell you that when the cat’s away the mouse will rob us to the tune of three hundred ducats a month?”
“There is no store anymore, Poppa.”
“What? No store? My store—”
“It’s good to see you, Poppa.”
“I turn my back five minutes and—”
“They built the new highway right through Kaplan’s—”
“Highway? Highway to where?”
“To the Cape. You know, so people from Providence and New York can—”
“Through the store? At Fourth and Pleasant?”
“There is no Fourth and Pleasant, Poppa. Only on the old maps.”
The old man begins to wail, in the ancient beseeching way, Job-like, his head facing the ceiling, his arms outstretched. He stops, has a thought.
“But you fought them, Son, oh, did you fight them. You fought them tooth and nail. They hardly knew what hit them. Am I right?”
Even now, in spite of his oversize head, the old man is still compact, well-built, and when he speaks he thrusts his whole body into each word, every word a punch. But it’s as though his father’s lips and tongue can’t keep up with what he’s saying. The man’s out of sync. Reminds Walt of when Milt and Pearl Feldman make him and Sarah sit through their interminable home movies. People talking like their mouths are filled with syrup.
“Well, Poppa, I sat through hearings. Think of the jobs, they said, think of the boon I-195 will bring to downtown renewal. Think of the shopping, people will come from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, to shop in Fall River! I stood up and said, ‘Drive a stake through a city’s heart, people are going to drive right past the body.’ And nobody, not the city, not the DPW—”
“Brick by brick, I built that store. One square block, two streets off South Main. Location like that, they must have paid us a fortune—”
“Eminent domain, Poppa. The state paid what they considered the land alone was—”
His father brings his hands to his head and pushes his ears together.
“For the good of the community,” Walt says.
“But the money they did pay, at least that—”
“Most of it I invested with the Sarkansky brothers.”
“The curtain makers?”
“Turned investment bankers. Opened up shop in the Academy Building not long after you—”
“Hoaxes!”
“You got that right.”
Somebody should have made a bust of his father’s head. He’d have put it on his desk in a building that no longer exists.
“Listen, Poppa. That was oceans ago. Irv Pincus says I had a heart attack.”
“He’s a doctor now, Irv Pincus? Sarkanskys are bankers and that dumbkampf is—”
“Irv’s got his own store. I work for him. On the floor, I—”
“A Kaplan for a Pincus? It’s a nightmare is what this is, me a visitation, a phantasm, and I’m the one having a night—”
“I feel woozy, Poppa.”
“Sloth!”
“My feet, I can’t feel my feet.”
His father tugs a chain out of his vest pocket and looks at his watch.
“You have to leave, Poppa?”
“Eight minutes past doomsday. But they’ve been saying that for years. How old are you now, boy?”
“I’m fifty-eight, Poppa.”
“How much do you need?” His father fishes around in his trouser pockets. “Will a ten-spot do you?”
“I’m so broke, Poppa, I don’t need money anymore.”
“Fifty-eight! When I was fifty-eight I had three whores a week, plus your mother. That kind of stamina.”
“Jewish whores? I always used to wonder if there were any Jewish whores.”
“You think there aren’t any Jewish whores?”
Hell, maybe I am in heaven.
“House full of them on Spring Street—eight thirty-two Spring Street—down in the Flint in the twenties. What a man can buy with money you can’t imagine. See-through pink dresses like they used to wear back in Poland. Pink on pink! I’ll cash some stock, I’ve still got shares in Bethlehem—”
“And Mother, Poppa?”
The little man’s cheeks grow big as balloons. “You’re calling your dear mother a whore?”
“I’m asking did you love her, Poppa.”
His father’s monumental head begins to wobble. And it’s like someone has punctured his cheeks with a needle, because they go flat. And his whole body, too, goes slack and folds inward on itself, and the little man begins to droop, slowly, slowly, out of sight below the precipice at the end of the bed. And Irv Pincus snores boisterous, wet, sloppy snores. Walt shifts on the mattress. If he doesn’t relieve himself this minute, he’ll spring a leak. Can’t move. Legs like two slabs of beef.
“Nurse!” Walt shrieks. “Toilet, Nurse!”
“Easy, Walt,” Irv says. “You got a thingamajig in there with you.”
Walt feels around. “Ah. Aha.”
And in the late-morning light: Sarah. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. Sarah, handbag in the crook of her arm, like a shopper at attention waiting for the morning doors of McWhirr’s to fling open. And beyond her, out the window, yes, the Braga Bridge and, beyond it, rising up out of the trees on the other side of the bay, as also foretold by Irv Pincus, the bulbous white cone, the power plant at Swansea. On the table beside the bed, flowers. On the one chair beside the bed, flowers. On the floor by the door, flowers. Sarah has on a new straw hat. Black band around it. Walt
closes his eyes. Eyes hurt. Funeral hat. Funereal hat. One noun doubles as an adjective; the other, what? An adjective inspired by a noun? He’ll have to check his Oxford Concise when he gets home. Home? If he makes it home. My God. Wife. His. He thinks of the first time he laid eyes on her. Nineteen thirty-seven. Sarah Gottlieb, the hatcheck girl at the Hotel Mellen. In her hatcheck-girl hat. Smaller hat than today’s. A bellhop-looking hat, a muffin top on her head, and he’d stood there in a line of men waiting to check their hats and reached up—a hatless head. And he’d run out into South Main, bought a three-dollar hat off a guy for five dollars. Got back in line, and when it was his turn, he said, “Walter Kaplan of Kaplan’s Furniture. You’re familiar? All the name brands, 139 Pleasant Street. Osborne 6-8571. Open eight to seven, weekdays; nine to four on Saturday.”
“You want to check your hat? Or don’t you?”
“What hat? Oh, yes. This—”
A month later they eloped to Rhode Island.
“Irv said you were out of your wits,” Walt says.
Motionless, she stands there with her handbag. “You’re going to leave me an empty house? Who’s going to fill it with brooding? Who’s going to water the plants?”
“What plants?” Walt says. “Aren’t they rubber?”
Sarah steps forward and leans, reaches for him, cups Walt’s chin, draws his unshaven face close to hers as if she needs to feel it in order to know the man’s still alive. Backs away again to access him from another angle. “Jews don’t do last rites,” she says. “You never see a rabbi with a Torah in his briefcase, running red lights.”
“You’re using my material,” Walt says. Who knew she listened? “New hat?”
“Why not?” With both hands she doffs her hat one way, then another, as people do to accentuate a hat. “Why not a new hat?”
“The merry widow. Look at Sarah Kaplan, née Gottlieb, jaunting around in her new hat. Come closer with all of you. My head, my everything, my feet. I feel clobbered. My eyeballs ache.”
And Sarah comes closer, again, and she collapses her newly hatted head on his chest and grabs his neck with both hands as if to strangle him. She’d sure as hell like to. Both are silent. They listen to each other breathe. Walt thinks, When was the last time we were so still we heard each other breathe? Don’t think, Walt, just—impossible—simply impossible to experience anything without commentary—shut up, Walt, shut up—her plump squeezable plumpness. Like an overripe eggplant. The British call them aubergines. French word must be. Less fun. Fondle an aubergine? An eternity without this body? What kind of vile god. Sarah’s handbag is still in the crook of her arm. At home he often tries to lift it. What does she carry around in there, a block of Fall River granite? God of the Five Books of Moses, that’s who, nasty murderous son of a bitch. All punishment, no mercy, no sense of humor. Maybe the Jews need Jesus after all. Died for us sinners, got himself tortured. New Testament says he’s Jewish, doesn’t look it, flowing golden locks. Guess they all were, or most. Not Ishmael, as he was Hagar’s—but didn’t Jesus laugh once in a while? Not Adonai, this ogre never—Jews for—didn’t Oliver Gevelber’s granddaughter run off with Jews for Jesus?—oh, Sar, I’ll miss you, there’s no calculating—remember how we used to roll around like happy hippos. Used to? If today’s Thursday, then Monday, Monday we copulated—
“This gown’s got no backside,” Walt says.
“Makes it easier to do your business,” Sarah says.
“Moon nurses, anyway. Are there nurses here?”
“Gittleman says it was relatively minor, all things considered, and that your ticker’s running normal again.”
Her head rose and fell with Walt’s breathing.
“A heart episode he called it. A farken-something.”
“Sounds German. All things considered? What does that even mean? How much of all things must we consider?”
“You’re fat, Walt. Not overweight. Fat. Obese, Gittleman says—”
“Gittleman’s not so undernourished himself.”
Which is good. Nobody wants a doctor who looks too healthy.
“He says you should get one of those bicycles you ride in the living room.”
“An Exercycle?”
Sarah raises her head to look at him. “What were you doing walking? Something wrong with the Lincoln? I thought we just replaced the carburetor.”
“I was getting some exercise.”
“Walt.”
“No joke, they got nurses at Truesdale? White scratchy dress, pointy white hat, squeaky, squishy shoes? Look like walking bandages. Angels of healing. What happens when a man—a patient, for instance—needs a glass of water? I use a divining rod?”
Sarah stands. Obscured by the flowers, on the table beside the bed, is a glass and a pitcher of water. She pours him one, and Walt hoists himself up on his pillow and drinks the water so fast it gets clogged in his throat and he gags.
“Walt? What? You got a honey on the side? A Little Miss Muffet stashed away on Eastern Avenue?”
“Pour me another, will you?”
Couple of gulps and he drinks that water down, too.
“I’d be impressed,” she says.
“It’s like I’ve been in the desert,” Walt says.
“Doesn’t Alf Dolinsky have an Exercycle?” Sarah says.
“Irv’s got me punching the clock like a stock boy, and you want to know if I’ve got a honey on Eastern Avenue?”
“So where were you walking?”
“You’re right, Alf does have an Exer—”
“Walt.”
“And you can tell Irv Pincus to kiss my ass, my gelatinous moon of an—”
“Don’t start,” Sarah says. “He was kind to help us out.”
“Help us out? I took one look at his smug last night and died.”
“You didn’t die, hon, you’re—”
“Wouldn’t know it by all the flowers. It’s a funeral in here.”
“Arthur called.”
“Which Arthur?”
“Your brother.”
“Oh, that Arthur.”
Sarah, worn out from being up most of the night (at home she didn’t sleep, she cleaned), takes a bouquet off the chair, puts it on the floor. Sinks into the chair. Sighs. “People love you, Walt, you don’t even know how much people—”
“You know what Alf calls Irv’s little Hitler mustache?”
“A thousand times, you’ve—”
“Pussy tickler!”
As if on cue, a nurse enters holding a tray. Squishy shoes, no white hat. Holy Christ, this is a hospital.
“I won’t ask what that is,” the nurse says.
“Don’t,” Sarah says.
“Breakfast, Mr. Kaplan?”
Nurse sets the tray down on Walt’s chest. Nice design, the tray has little baskets on either end that prop it on the bed. In one basket is silverware, in the other a napkin and a package with a moist towelette. Nurse is pretty, tall. Tall women, less need for a hat. Maybe early forties. Or still in her thirties and working here has aged her into her forties. Slightly upturned nose, Walt always likes a slightly upturned nose. Not too much or it’s haughty, but a little turn upward, that’s—
“Wait, I know you. You’re Josephine—”
“Downey. Was. I’m back to Borger now.”
“Do you live on Eastern Avenue?” Sarah says.
“I live in Somerset.”
“Across the bridge,” Walt says.
“But I used to shop at Kaplan’s. We bought our wedding furniture from you. A dinette, a refrigerator, a bedroom set.”
“Satisfied?”
“The bed was sturdier than the husband.”
Sarah laughs out loud, first time in two days.
“And the fridge?”
“It gurgles at night like it’s alive.”
“A Westinghouse?”
“How should I know?”
“Your Westinghouses will do that. But it works? Things are built like tanks. You could cross the Rhine in one
of those fridges.”
Josephine, with a deft movement, lifts the sheets to retrieve the bedpan. “Well done. Sleep good? You missed some excitement.”
“Like the dead.”
“You should see the difference,” Josephine says. “I walk in on a corpse, I know it right away.”
“Peaceful?” Walt asks.
“More like exhausted. Your friend was here all night. He’s very devoted.”
“He’s a circling turkey vulture.”
“His brother-in-law,” Sarah says. “Loves him like a—”
“Need anything else? I’ll be back in a bit to check your vitals, and Dr. Gittleman will be here to see you this afternoon.”
“Egg rolls,” Walt says. “Couple few egg rolls?”
Squeaky shoes out the door without an answer.
“Sold that nurse a Westinghouse!”
Sarah starts rooting around in her purse for a tissue.
“No, come on, Sar, don’t—”
“Drop dead and I swear, Walt, I’ll wipe the floor with you.”
Sarah honks her nose. A container ship marking territory on the Narragansett. And out the window Mount Hope Bay and the Braga Bridge. The Braga used to be green. Due for a new paint job. Crazy thing is before the bridge linked up with I-195, he’d loved it. A beauty of an unfinished bridge reaching across the water from Somerset. Each day, it inched a little closer. They named it after Charlie Braga, a Fall Riverite sacrificed at Pearl Harbor. Poor kid. Never found whatever was left of his body. They could have named London Bridge after him, wouldn’t have mattered to Charlie Braga.
“Listen, Sarah.”
“It doesn’t matter. What could it possibly matter? I want you to get that bicycle. Do you think Alf—”
And silence, the kind of silence where they talk with their eyes because if they said what they were thinking it would get so maudlin it would disgust them, which would only make it more maudlin. Strange conundrum that after all these years they can still sweat over each other at the drop of a hat. Even here amid the smell of disinfectant and flowers. People down the hall breathing their last. Drop of a hatcheck girl’s hat and the two of them, Walt and Sarah, Sarah and Walt—