Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  Plotkin and Walt aren’t friends, but when somebody knows—pretty much exactly—how much money you don’t have, there’s a certain unspoken intimacy.

  “Look, Jerry, I just about did it myself.”

  “What?”

  “Not the Watuppa, the Braga Bridge. The day I had my heart attack, I was fully intending to walk up the Braga—”

  “There’s no way to walk up the Braga Bridge, Walt, and you know it,” Plotkin says. “There’s hardly a breakdown lane.”

  “What did I care? A car hits me, a car hits me.”

  Plotkin stares. They could still have been talking about stocks. In a way, maybe they still were. Stocks being all about might or might not.

  “A fog, Jerry. Felt like there was no end to it. Hardly thought about Sarah. It was like she didn’t exist. I’d just made a sale. Dinette set. Nice couple, new in town, if you can believe it. Bought a little house in Steep Brook. Moved here from Worcester. Maybe Fall River’s got something on Worcester? Irv gives me a wink, like Attaboy, I still got the touch. That’s when I walk out. Been thinking about it months, I don’t know, years. Don’t know why that day. Irv shouts, ‘Hey, where you goin’?’ but I’m walking, I’m floating, really. It was like I already felt myself falling, you know what I mean? Like I was on my way to do something that I’d already done?”

  “You want to buy and sell a little, Walt?” Plotkin says. “Otherwise, I got work.”

  They sit for a bit. Walt shifting and reshifting in his chair. Plotkin, his hands now fisted, waiting for this visit to be over.

  “Sometimes I think of all the money I’d make,” Walt says, “if I really put my mind to it.”

  Plotkin lets go his fists, laughs, laughs with his whole body. Him jiggling in his chair, and Walt thinks, We know as much about what goes on in other people’s heads as we do in other people’s houses. Closed blinds, front walks, faces, eyes, all tools of the hiding trade. You think because you grew up with a guy you know him from Adam? Walk in here and try to—what?—relate (isn’t that the word?) to another man?

  They pulled her out of the North Watuppa. A cop and a couple of guys from the water department. She was floating, hadn’t sunk. Sad operation. Plotkin was back to talking about not a here-and-there investment but a long-term strategy, enough with this futzing around—“I’d need at least five or six thousand to do a thing for you, Walt, but the only thing you’ve got that even comes close is your life insurance”—except that today even his set speech, even his joke about life insurance, sounds as though he’s reciting it from memory, like a prayer he’s refused to forget but no longer believes in.

  We attempt consolation at our peril. Because what if it’s accepted? Then what? What would it look like? Jerry Plotkin in tears? Walt would run out of this office so fast—

  Still, Walt wants to say to him, Jerry, you belong to no clubs, we never see you at Magoni’s or the Gang Plank or the Chinaman’s or even at Gus’s. You never make an appearance in temple, even for the sake of business, even on high holidays when people are busting down the doors of the place to be seen. You think I’m such a believer, Jerry? I turn up at Beth El out of loyalty to my dead. You see? It’s once removed. I sit there. I don’t listen to a word of it. I watch myself being loyal to my mother, to my father. A far cry from belief, whatever that is, but it’s something. Not for them, not for the sake of the talk, for you, for Rachel. At the very least, Jerry, you can look at your loyalty, which is not nothing—

  “—but like I say, I’m not a magician. You scrounge up a little cash out of some forgotten savings account or out from under the mattress or some old bird aunt leaves you a few dollars, I’ll—”

  The branch screaks against the window.

  “You ever talk to the fortune-teller?” Walt asks.

  “Only when she needs the bathroom key.”

  12

  Notes on Practical Salesmanship

  The summer Walt graduated Durfee High, Max sent him to do a three-week course in practical salesmanship at the National Sales Training Association in Chicago. He took the train west from Boston. It would be the longest stretch of time he’d ever spend away from Fall River in his life. He slept in a Loop hotel rented out by the association. His roommate was a seemingly mute older man from Arkansas who sold farm equipment and slept in his clothes. At night, in his dreams, this man screamed. Night after night, the salesman from Arkansas screamed. Walt got into the habit of getting dressed and walking the streets until dawn. Then he’d return to his room because the man would by then have finally descended into a deep-enough sleep. Whatever he was so afraid of could no longer reach him. Aside from the man from Arkansas, Walt retained only one memory from the course in practical salesmanship, something deliciously unpractical. It was an anecdote that the instructor, a cigar-chewing typewriter salesman (he’d chew the cigar during class, leave a little trail of moist bits as he wandered around the room) told on the very first day about Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. The typewriter salesman read it out of a textbook. I got a little story for you chickadees to start us off. Don’t know who wrote it, but it’s some good stuff. Lesson one, narrative is the key to selling!

  Let’s say you are selling Thomas Carlyle’s book on the French Revolution. You will greatly interest your prospect by telling him that after Carlyle wrote his masterwork, he sent his only copy of the manuscript to the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill. One night Mill laid down the manuscript in a careless manner and in the morning, the maid, thinking it a lot of useless paper, put it into the fire. What you get for sending a book to the competition! The most painstaking scholarly work, years of hard labor, up in smoke. Carlyle was prostrated by the loss and couldn’t bring himself to the task of returning to it, but later on, while pondering the matter, he watched a workman laying the foundation of a building and mused, “That wall will one day hold up the happy house of someone and that worker will have made it possible.” Abandoning his moodiness, Carlyle set back to work. Now who wouldn’t want to buy Carlyle’s History of the French of the Revolution? Narrative is the key to selling!

  Not a day in his life, presiding over Kaplan’s Furniture, his feet up on the desk on the mezzanine level—Walt loved the mezzanine, a sort of in-between place, not quite here, not quite there, the perfect perch from which to think—did Walt fail to think of Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle looking out the window and seeing a man actually working. I am inspired! Walt felt the same way watching Ukey, his upholsterer, at work in the shop. It almost made him want to—what?—work? And whenever he thought of Carlyle, he also thought of the farm-equipment salesman from Arkansas. For Walt, the two would always be a pair. Carlyle returns to work, in a fever. The man from Arkansas, silent all day, but at night he, too, in his way, went to work. His screams must have kept the entire hotel awake. A few times Walt reached out and touched him, tried to comfort him a little. But the man from Arkansas didn’t want comfort. He wanted to scream. And so Walt, rather than try to sleep, wandered the streets of Chicago, a city that didn’t so much overwhelm him as stifle him. The geography of the place made no sense. It was a city with no vantage point from which to experience it. One of the old boosters said of Fall River, As one approaches the city from Providence, Fall River appears to be like Rome, built on seven hills as it rises majestically from the waterfront. Chicago did not rise. It spread, like an infection, block after block, like a caricature of oblivion. Later, when every couple of years he’d return to Chicago to visit (two days maximum) his daughter and two grandsons, he’d again wander the city and wonder what happened to the man from Arkansas.

  A few times when she was small, Miriam cried out in her sleep. Walt would run into the room from across the hall like the house was on fire. But how could he protect her from what only she could see? Our history is not a continuous line; it’s a circle we draw over and over on a desk blotter. Chicago, Fall River, Chicago. Thomas Carlyle, the man from Arkansas, my own daughter, Thomas Carlyle. Work, not work. The terrors of the sleeper and
the helplessness of those awake.

  13

  Gus’s Highland Spa

  Something else,” Walt says.

  “Can’t there be a day of nothing else?” Alf says. “A single day when nothing whatsoever occurs to you?”

  “I’ve got this idea.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Kaplan’s History of Fall River.”

  “A book? You’re writing a book? Now, there’s something that will occupy your idle hours and keep you so busy maybe you’ll work through lunch—”

  “Not a book.”

  “Noreen?” Alf says. “Where’s Noreen?”

  Gus from the kitchen: “Out back. Smoke break. Union mandate.”

  “Noreen’s unionized?” Walt says.

  “I was kidding, Jimmy Hoffa,” Gus says.

  “Can we order direct from the bountiful source?” Alf says.

  “You know the system,” Gus says. “I make the slop. You order from Noreen.”

  Alf’s added another chin since Monday. It’s like a colony. One chin hears it’s good down there below the end of his face, and all his friends keep coming and coming.

  “A history sounds like a book.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Walt says. “I’m taking Carlyle one step further.”

  “Carlyle’s a toity hotel,” Alf says. “Ruthie’s cousin got—”

  “Thomas Carlyle.”

  “You’re losing me. You always lose me—”

  “I’m not trying to rewrite the history,” Walt says. “I’m thinking it. Get it? It disappears as soon as I think about it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. I’m composing something as ethereal as history itself. I can still make a house, only it’s in my—”

  “Tomorrow, I’m going to Wong’s, and I’m going to listen to the music of my own lack of thoughts.”

  “Go,” Gus says. “Nobody’s stopping you.”

  “You don’t see the beauty?” Walt says.

  “Beauty of what? History of what?” Alf says.

  “Everything. Shoelaces, farts, love, death, cantaloupes—all I have to do is remember.”

  “Noreen!”

  “You’ve got Fowler’s History of Fall River. And, of course, Philip’s three-volume history. More recently there’s Alberto Caeiro’s pamphlets. Wonderful stuff. Terrific chronicle of the fire of ’28. Excellent work on the highway and the removals. But what happens? Any history will sit on the shelf and eventually molder with the other relics. Why? Alf, you ask me why.”

  “ ’Cause books get moldy in our humid climate.”

  “Because they aspire to completeness! They’ve got a first page and a last page. That’s the killer right there. The beauty, I won’t say brilliance, of Kaplan’s history is that its essence is the essential fact of its incompleteness, that’s what makes it so—”

  “No Jews,” Alf says.

  “No Jews what?” Walt says.

  “No Jew ever wrote a history of Fall River. Written or unwritten.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But why would they?” Alf says. “Not our town. Never has been, never will be.”

  Noreen comes up with her notepad.

  “Do you two ever work?” she says.

  “We’re independently wealthy,” Alf says.

  “Two clubs?” Noreen says, and without waiting for an answer, saunters away.

  “I’m born here, I’ll die here,” Walt says. “It’s not my town?”

  “No.”

  “What’s my town?” Walt says. “Some feudal village in the Carpathians I see only in my nightmares? That’s my town?”

  “Yeah,” Alf says. “That’s your town.

  “The Irish, the Canucks, the Italians,” Alf says. “Even the Portuguese. It’s their town, Walt. Jews here, we’re—what?—ephemeral, that’s it, we’re—”

  “The Irish aren’t ephemeral?”

  “Nope.”

  14

  Agudas Achim

  I dreamed you buried me in the old cemetery out on Fish Road.”

  “Fish Road?” Sarah says. “Where all the ancient Jews are?”

  “You think we’re immune from becoming ancient Jews?”

  “Last time we were out there was for my aunt Winona. Abe’s wife? Remember Winona and Abe? Ran a little store in the Flint.”

  “Sold hats?”

  “Right! And also sundries.”

  “Always loved sundries,” Walt says. “Buy myself a comb, maybe a box of toothpicks. Sundries both.”

  “Walt?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What about our plot at Beth El? We’re not paid up?”

  Talking in the dark again. Consider the flow of talk, the river of words, and yet it’s as though the darkness acts as a kind of oppositional sun—a black hole?—and the words, millions of them, evaporate, vanish, fall. Dante’s Virgil says that hell is hollow. I can see it already, an old, rotten, hollowed-out log, and we talk our way down, down—

  “Walt? We’re not paid up?”

  “What? No, we’ve got perpetual care, whatever that means. May thine lawn always be mowed and windblown garbage disposed—I wrote Ruderman a fat check years ago.”

  “So why Fish Road?”

  “You tell me. I’m in the back of the hearse and instead of taking Highland Ave north, the driver swings right on Walnut and makes another right on Robeson. I’m confused. South? He’s heading south? I try and tap the driver on the shoulder—Hey, pal, wrong way—but my hands don’t work and anyway, right, I’m stuck in a box. I can see out of the box, which makes no sense. South on Robeson? Then I think maybe I get it, there’s only one place they bury Jews south of the temple, and that’s at Agudas Achim. You know? Fish Road Cemetery? Except there’s no Fish Road on any map, never has been. It was only because the Jews used to peddle fish, and that’s why they used to call—I figured you were planning on remarrying. Dump me at Agudas Achim. Out of sight, out of mind. And why not? Don’t I want you to be happy?”

  “You got anybody in mind?”

  “What about Kermit Baumgartner? Widower, family money, aluminum. Nice house on Albany, white trim, red shingles.”

  “Kermit’s gimpy,” Sarah says.

  “It’s an old war injury,” Walt says. “Kermit got shot on D-Day. The man’s an authenticated hero. The shrapnel’s still—”

  “Walt?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to tell you something.”

  Never a good sign, this announcement. “How can I run for cover when I’m already under the covers?”

  “Alf told Ruthie about the bridge, and Ruthie, of course—”

  “Brutus! Brutessa!”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Sar—”

  “You think I’ve never thought about it. What? I’m not intellectual enough? That there aren’t days I’m exhausted, long past exhausted? Shut the windows and stick my head in the oven like a poet. You think I’m incapable?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Listen, I’m talking. Remember when we first moved into this house? The lady died, what was her name—”

  “Lucy Harrison.”

  “And her son wanted to sell as soon as possible because he was going off to the army, what year—”

  “Forty-two,” Walt says. “It was 1942 when the son, Alan—”

  “Right, but I’m talking,” Sarah says. “I’m—so there was an urgency about it and not just on the son’s side but on ours, too, because we wanted the place right away, as soon as we saw it we wanted it, the little place on Weetamoe was too cramped with Mirry getting bigger, but it was beyond all this—it was like the place was already ours. Like we already lived in it before we paid a cent, and I remember thinking, We’re going to wear it out, the carpets, the linoleum, the plumbing, and, yes, the beds, we were even going to wear out the beds of this little—”

  “We got new Sealy Posturepedics five years ago. These new beds don’t even creak—”

  “And you said to the son out on the sidewalk, We’ll
take it, we’ll take it as is, no inspection, we didn’t even have Angelo come and check out the boiler, remember? And the kid said, Don’t you want me to move out the stuff, and you said, Take what you want, and he did, and that was that, and for years, no, still, still we live with that old lady’s cups and saucers, her bowls. My sisters used to laugh, but what did I ever care about crockery? I never gave a damn about crockery in my entire life. Have I? Have I ever?”

  Walt climbs over to Sarah’s bed, and the two of them lie side by side.

  “You think I wasn’t serious,” Walt says.

  “I know you weren’t. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have done it. Plenty of people who weren’t serious have jumped, if only to prove they were. Is the idea that I’ll always play the widow? What if I don’t want to? What if I refuse? Walt? What if I’d rather not?”

  “Sarah.”

  “No, I’m talking.”

  Except she doesn’t, and they remain side by side, each leaking a little over their respective edge, okay, more than a little, but side by side.

  15

  Kaplans

  Max Kaplan, founder of Kaplan’s Furniture, once told his son Walt this, or something like it: “No. We didn’t work in the mills. We didn’t build this city. But we weren’t the mill owners, either. From a pushcart to a store on Fourth and Pleasant is an eternity, an honorable eternity, an eternity of progress. We were never going to work in the mills. Back when I was starting out, you know what they called us? Parasites! But where are the mill owners now? We’re still here—Jews are still in Fall River—where’d the mill owners go? Their heirs are holed up in their Newport mansions. Fall River? Where’s that? We ought to get a little credit for sticking it out, no?”

  “Jews have been fleeing this city for years, Poppa. Like we fled Shershov.”