Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  “Any better today?”

  “Nope, not that I’ve—people walk by, they peer in, they say, Isn’t that Walt Kap—I got to get some blinds.”

  “What about Irv?”

  “Over my corpse full of maggots.”

  “He says he needs someone of your depth of experience.”

  “The minute Kaplan’s shuts down, he opens—”

  “It was three years after you closed and he—”

  “Popular Furniture? What kind of man calls his own store popular?”

  “They’re coming for dinner, Irv and Dottie—”

  “I just feel banged up, Sar.”

  “I know, sweet.”

  “Nothing’s even banged me up and I feel—”

  “I know, I know,” Sarah says.

  “I got to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Calls, I gotta—”

  What was the other Sullivan sister’s name? Mary and—who?

  10

  Massachusetts v. Rhode Island

  On a map Fall River looks like a tolling bell. Walt used to sit weekend days in his shoebox study, hardly insulated from the bedlam of his little family (extraordinary, what a racket two females can unleash on a house, such hollering, such pattering up and down the stairs, up and down, up and down the—), smooth flat a map with both palms, and behold: Fall River. A bell in motion, swinging left. A map is not a closed system. Look at a map long enough, and it always yields something that wasn’t there the last time you looked. Today, the discovery of a little street in the Flint called Merino. Merino? Wool? When did Merino Street come to be? Has it always been there, hiding off Alden? Maybe, maybe not. An impossibly detailed view of a city, one you couldn’t even get up in a plane because there’s no way, even from up there, you could take in every contour, every rumpled edge. No, believers, a map isn’t a precise render; it’s a beautiful guess. A lonely surveyor’s exquisite shot in the dark. A map’s a fantasy. Spill some water on a piece of paper and wait for it to dry. Doesn’t take long for a shoreline to form along the edge. That’s a map of somewhere. Oh, imperfect ejaculation! And here lies Fall River spread open before me, a lovely city, still. He runs his finger from Steep Brook to Brayton Avenue, a length of maybe fifty inches of paper. All that pavement, all that sweat, longing, striving, house after house, triple-decker after triple-decker. Before him a symbol that can hardly contain what it’s supposed to be a symbol of. Silently it seethes. And yet this very map, flimsy and rippable as it is (How about the time they were driving to Maine and Walt shouted, “Which way, Sarah? What does the map say, Sarah?” And she ripped the map into shreds and said, “That. That’s what the map says”), remains the only viable instrument that can provide us, with any reasonable degree of certainty, the answer to the elemental question: Where does Fall River begin and where does Fall River end?

  (Related but not, of course, essential: Where does the irrelevance known as Tiverton, Rhode Island, otherwise known as some trees, begin?)

  And yet, again, and yet. In this instance, the map failed, failed utterly. Take note: the great boundary tumult between Fall River and Rhode Island, formally known as 37 U.S. 657. Yes, the question of Fall River’s southern boundary reached the august chambers of the United States Supreme Court in 1838! The roots of this maddeningly overcomplicated wrangle had to do with the original purchase of colossal swaths of Pocasset territory in exchange for some muskets, a few bushels of grain, and twenty pairs of leather shoes. To the Indians, who had no concept of private ownership of land (how could land possibly be divisible from sky?), it seemed like a good deal, at the time. Occupy land? In perpetuity? Impossible. When the impossible became a lot less impossible, King Philip and the brave squaw, Fall River’s own Weetamoe, saw the writing on the wall and rose up. Eventually both: crushed. Philip ambushed. Weetamoe drowned in the Taunton. They stuck her pretty head on a pole. Call King Philip’s War a bloody footnote. Haven’t we always? Named our banks, our streets after them. We kill, we honor. We rented on Weetamoe for seven years when Mirry was little. After Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay merged in 1691, George II, fifty years later, was of the opinion that Massachusetts was getting too big for its britches and so lopped off a piece of it. Roger Williams was a nut, but Rhode Island kissed better royal ass. Besides, what was the harm in giving away a piece of the pie that to an English king was an abstraction anyway? George II didn’t know Rhode Island from Punjab. Henceafter, Fall River’s southern border was demarked as the old buttonwood tree on the east side of South Main, just south of Columbia Street. South Main and Columbia? You got to be kidding me. That meant everything south of Corky Row was Rhode Island? At that time fifteen hundred taxable souls and property, but even then it was foreseeable that here Fall River would soon be spreading. It must have felt to the Bordens, the Bluffoms, the Higginbothams, the Moneypennys, the Wombats, like they’d had a leg amputated. Took a revolution and a few more decades to right this wrong, and even then the Supreme Court stopped short. According to Orin Fowler’s history, the court “granted full claim to neither state.” But the majority of urban blocks were returned to Fall River, and the line is now at State Avenue, at Townsend Hill. Thank the God I wish I could believe in.

  Mirry’s eyeball at the keyhole. “What are you doing?” she says.

  “I’m overseeing the restoration.”

  “What?”

  “Righting monarchical wrongs.”

  “The crimes of Rhode Island again?” Mirry says.

  Where’s the key that belongs in that keyhole? It’s been lost since—what?—1941? You’d think somebody would have stumbled on it. Fell in a vent? Mouse took it?

  “The repercussions reverberate to this day. Globe Corners still suffers from lack of economic integration and adequate transit routes.”

  “Anything else new?” Mirry asks. “Any discoveries today?”

  “Actually, just now, this second,” Walt says. “I did notice there’s a little neck north of Bluffom’s Beach I’ve never—”

  “What are you going to call it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “We’re out of dead Indians?”

  “We might be.”

  “That’s because we only know a few of their names.”

  “Holy smokes, you are my daughter! Funny, just today I was wondering about your mother, contemplating a paternity test—”

  “A what?”

  Walt gets up and sinks, heavy, to his knees, peeks into the keyhole. It’s shining. A daughter’s eyeball. Map that, ye cartographers.

  And Sarah, downstairs, shouts: “Miriam! Grilled cheese!”

  11

  Rachel Plotkin

  The evening Herald News reported that Plotkin’s wife drowned in North Watuppa Pond. What wasn’t in the paper was that the following morning, a Tuesday, Plotkin, a stockbroker, went to work as usual. On his lunch hour he left his office and walked two blocks to Beth El on High Street to make the arrangements.

  Immediately, he waved away the rabbi’s condolences. When the rabbi tried to close the office door, Plotkin said, “Please, leave it be.”

  The rabbi, actually a substitute rabbi filling in for Rabbi Ruderman, who was convalescing after a hernia operation, wasn’t going to rock any boats. And wasn’t he well versed in the angry confusions of grief? The quieter ones, the substitute rabbi thought, suffer more. It bottles up.

  The rabbi, on the advice of Fred Solinsky, president of the congregation, permitted Rachel Plotkin to be interned in a consecrated section of the cemetery in the Plotkin family plot, as opposed to across the service road. Besides, the substitute rabbi, who’d come to Fall River from Albany and couldn’t wait to get home, justified, to himself, since nobody else had questioned it, that it could have been an accident. From what he’d read in the paper, she’d left no note, and there were no rocks in her pockets. That she’d gone for a swim in the Fall River water supply in October was far-fetched, but hadn’t stranger things happened under the eyes of God? And: Jewish law is n
othing if not flexible.

  The rabbi and Plotkin agreed to a brief graveside service, to take place Thursday morning in order to give relatives time to be present.

  “There will be no shiva,” Plotkin said.

  “That’s your choice,” the rabbi said. “But you can’t stop other immediate relations.”

  “I know.”

  “If you want to talk, as you can see,” the rabbi said with a laugh, “my door’s always—”

  “I don’t want to talk, Rabbi.”

  The two shook hands. The temple secretary, Connie Blum, listened to all this while pretending to file documents in the front office. Connie told Renda Grayboys, who told Ruthie Dolinsky, who told Sarah, etc., etc.

  Rachel was Sarah’s optometrist. She’d tested Sarah’s eyes and fitted her out for new glasses not a month earlier. Jerry Plotkin had gone to school with Walt and had been, for years, Walt’s broker.

  Sarah and Walt attended the service on Thursday morning. There were five or six rows of chairs, all filled. The rest of the mourners stood. One of those sunny days in October when the light had that gentle yellow hue. Plotkin sat in the front with one chair separating him from Rachel’s two grown children. Their mother’s chair, Walt thought. The substitute rabbi spoke lovingly and briefly about Rachel’s love of family, as well as her commitment to her work.

  One of the children, the daughter, stood up and spoke about how her mother enjoyed walking at Horseneck Beach after a storm. “She was at home out there in wind.” Then she sat down.

  Plotkin himself didn’t speak. He didn’t take off his dark glasses. Nor did he willingly receive any consolation from those who wanted to offer it. A few people refused to recognize this unwillingness and hugged him anyway, Plotkin’s arms stiff at his sides. He didn’t join the line of mourners who emptied small, tentative shovelfuls of dirt upon Rachel’s casket.

  That night, they did sit shiva at Rachel’s brother’s house in Providence. Sarah and Walt drove up with a casserole.

  “After my last exam, I probably spent an hour dithering over frames,” Sarah said. “I’d choose one frame and then another and go back to not liking the first one. She only laughed at me.”

  “While Rome burns,” Walt said.

  “What?”

  “I said while Rome burns.”

  “Turn off at West River,” Sarah said.

  “Where?”

  “West River.”

  “How will I know it? The smell? Would it kill Rhode Island to put up a street sign?”

  No, there hadn’t been a social friendship, but there had always been warmth. When Sarah cheated on her exam, Rachel would swat her elbow. “Close your left eye, Mrs. Kaplan. I’m not the Mass RMV.”

  A second marriage for both Plotkin and Rachel. The first Mrs. Plotkin (née Borowitz) had left after three or four years and moved to Connecticut. Whether it was Plotkin, or Fall River, nobody knew, but it was said the ex-wife remarried richer. Rachel was originally from Warwick and, before she married Plotkin, had only worked in Fall River, and so nobody knew what her née was. (Plotkin, too, met her while he was having his eyes examined.) She’d once told Sarah she’d lost her first husband young. “I was just a kid and we had two more kids. He was there, and then he wasn’t there.” At the brother’s house, Rachel’s two children stood at the door and dutifully accepted the casseroles and condolences of a stream of a Fall Riverites who’d come to tell them how much their mother had meant to them. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she’d cared for so many pairs of eyes. People were rattled by her death as if somehow it might affect their vision.

  Plotkin didn’t show up.

  There was side talk that Rachel might have been ill for some time, and that as a consequence she’d decided to take things into her own hands. It was possible, but Sarah thought back to the last time she’d seen her, how buoyant she’d seemed, more so than usual. But hadn’t she heard that for someone who’s made up their mind, everything becomes so much lighter? It made sense, in a way. Like suddenly nothing costs you anything anymore?

  In the absence of any actual facts—Plotkin wasn’t talking and who would be crass enough to ask her children?—the murmuring, at the shiva and around town, naturally gravitated toward blaming Plotkin, who’d always been gruff, stubborn, and standoffish. All these qualities magnified now.

  The Plotkins were one of those couples you didn’t see together. You saw Plotkin at his office on Rock Street. You saw Rachel in the shop on South Main. But the fact that they weren’t seen together in public didn’t necessarily mean their marriage wasn’t happy. On the contrary, in Sarah’s experience, the more attached at the hip, the more sniping, the more potential for knocking each other around. Nora Kupernick bopping Teddy so hard on the head with a hair dryer he had to go to the hospital only a recent case in point. The Plotkins lived up in the Highlands on Ray Street in a house set back from the street. There was a little garden in the side yard, and once or twice Walt, out walking his streets, had actually seen the two of them puttering around there. An Adam-and-Eve sort of image. The front walk was always clear of leaves and snow, though probably Plotkin hired somebody, since it was hard to imagine him out there with a rake or a shovel. Neither Walt nor Sarah had ever been inside the Plotkin house.

  The funeral, the shiva, and that would have been it. The sadness would have, as it must, given way to another piece of news. But it turned out that Walt had a previously scheduled appointment with Plotkin for the following Tuesday. Sarah and Walt debated whether he should cancel, but they decided this wouldn’t look right. Sarah said, “Just show up, and if he’s there, he’s there.” So 10:00 a.m. Tuesday, Walt parks the Lincoln in the small parking lot adjacent to Plotkin’s building. The place used to be home to some of the city’s best lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, and investment bankers, but now Plotkin shares space with a baseball-card dealer, a hair salon, a frequently drunk chiropractor, and most recently a clairvoyant named Madam Fontaine.

  Plotkin worked alone. He’d once been in business with his father, but the older Plotkin had died in the early ’60s. Back when Plotkin and Walt had gone to school together, Plotkin was considered a whiz kid bound for Wall Street. He’d gone to Wharton on the Jewish quota, but after only a couple of years in Manhattan he returned to Fall River to work for his father. Plotkin, it was often said, was one of those who “failed to live up to his potential.” Vindictive word, potential. You lug it around like a third foot. It’s always going to trip you. Walt didn’t want much to do with anybody who’d lived up to their potential. And though Walt no longer had any money to invest, he always made a point of going to see Plotkin every few months to check up on his pennies.

  Walt knocks softly on the door.

  “It’s open.”

  Plotkin sits behind his desk, his coat off, wearing a crisp-looking white shirt and red suspenders. The room is stuffy. A radiator hisses in the corner. For a few moments, neither man says anything. Against the glass of the office’s single window, a branch screaks. On anyone else, the red suspenders might look festive. Plotkin, who’d once run track for Durfee, had, like them all, filled out considerably over the years. But he didn’t seem to have bought any new clothes. The suspenders aren’t holding anything up. He sits there pinched.

  “Walt.”

  “Jerry.”

  “You good, Walt? I heard you had a scare.”

  “I’m good, Jerry.”

  “Sarah? Miriam?”

  “Good, they’re both doing fine.”

  “Good, good.”

  “Listen, Jerry, lemme just say—”

  Plotkin leans forward, elbows on his desk, hands splayed together, all ten fingers touching. “What can I do for you, Walt? I looked over your numbers. Not bad, considering how much we’re talking about. You got IBM down a few quarter points. Kraft’s up three and a half. Bristol-Myers up one and a quarter.”

  He doesn’t look down at any paper. Plotkin hasn’t taken his eyes off Walt since he’s come
through the door. Walt feels like a shoplifter. Not the first time. In a store, whenever he feels eyes on him, he always has to resist stuffing something in his pants. You want a thief, I’ll give you a thief.

  “People like cheese,” Walt says. “Cheese always—”

  “And Midlothian Oil’s down four points.”

  Plotkin’s face has gone in the opposite direction from his body. Gaunt, it’s as though his cheeks have turned inside out. Little hollows. Walt thinks of the frilly soap dishes Sarah is always buying. They’ve always got more soap dishes than soap. That’s because soap doesn’t last as long as plastic, Sarah says.

  “But even so,” Plotkin says, “we could buy more oil. With this so-called energy crisis, we could pick up some bargains.”

  “If that’s what you advise, Jerry.”

  Plotkin’s small green eyes watch him. Walt looks away. Nothing on the walls besides smudges, as if somebody or something has rubbed itself in a few places. No pictures, no certificates, no diplomas. Talk is that Plotkin doesn’t even have an updated license anymore, but if he can do this in his sleep, what does he need with the state of Massachusetts telling him he knows how?

  “So,” Plotkin says. “You want to sell a little cheese and buy a little oil?”

  “I do like the idea of cheese, I feel like people are always going to—”

  “Walt, this is why you have no money.”

  “I have no money as a result of a number of factors.”

  “Aside from all that.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to make me some?”

  “I can’t turn water into wine, Walt, I can’t just crack my knuckles—”

  The radiator adds knocking to the hissing. The place is grubby, hasn’t been cleaned in years, and yet Plotkin still talks big. Still the kid that went off to Wharton to do his parents and Fall River proud. Plotkin begins to tell Walt what he always tells him, that only money breeds money. Nothing else, no substitutes. Yeah, people talk, they’ll always talk. Because talk, Walt, is money’s great opposite. Talk’s always a net loss.