Carnovsky's Retreat

by Larry Duberstein

  Oscar never saw it this way, never made explicit the import of the journal to the journey, although he did carefully preserve it. He certainly never saw himself as an artist, holing up in a garret where he could be freed from bourgeois restraints and purge himself through the performance of a work. But he was purged. Never sour or even reserved after his return—quite the reverse, he was remarkably ebullient—never bitter by anyone’s account, and he never again wandered away. He often remarked that my aunt was the best thing in his life and on his deathbed rambled incoherently about her beauty, his heart full even as it was failing.

  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the journal to me personally is this: here is an accounting of one man’s daily life, his darkest thoughts and doings mingled with his best, and though I may squirm in embarrassment whenever I am mentioned and become “Walter” or “my nephew Walter,” nevertheless there is nothing in all these pages to make me love my uncle less, or admire him less I should say. To me, and despite all his protestations, he was a very special man.

  In any event, with my acquisition of the document, the Three Big Mysteries of Oscar Carnovsky were laid to rest, the case was closed, and yet I had many questions still, an ongoing curiosity, and so one month after I had gone through these pages a fourth time and had allowed them to settle into the empty recesses of my mind, I made a couple of pilgrimages. The first of these was to Brooklyn, to Albemarle Road where my aunt was now living alone, as no doubt she will for the duration.

  I thought to take along my sons, as I would on later visits, but this time decided to see Tanya by myself, so we could speak freely. Tanya was not related to me by blood and I had never felt a strong tie to her. She prepared food, and cleaned the mess, and had never made it possible to know her, so I didn’t. For that reason, I suppose, she was surprised to hear I wanted to come out and talk.

  This reaction convinced me she had not taken the trouble to know the contents of the box she handed me at Oscar’s funeral. If she had perused the journal, she might have chosen to suppress or destroy it—might simply have failed to execute the bequest. And she would not have been surprised that I came with questions. So it was possible Tanya knew very little of what Oscar had done while “in orbit.” Having seen the two of them function as a couple, this seemed not unlikely to me.

  It was May and we sat on white wicker chairs in the small yard behind the house. Tanya was a gardener and had her early flowers up, primroses and daffodils, and her early vegetables were staked or marked, her hedges trimmed; even the gravel was neat on the walk. About her person, she took less care. I could discern in her face the bone-structure that had made her a beauty and her eyes were still quite striking. She had kept up her weekly dancing, and walking ahead of me with the tray of drinks she had the muscular calves of a thirty-five-year-old woman. But she had made only a cursory pass at her flyaway hair and bound it in a rubber band, affected no makeup or jewelry, and though she had been expecting me wore a simple cotton house-dress with frayed hem and a pocket that having come unstitched at one corner, hung down in a red triangular flap.

  From this carelessness, moreso than from the cleverness of her plantings, I had an impression that she would respond honestly to my questions, openly. She had no reason to do so, for these were sensitive, private matters and I was certainly no confidante of hers, yet I hoped she would have equally no reason not to, which proved to be the case. Tanya was not the least bit evasive—she was perfectly happy to reminisce, and held nothing back in the name of dignity. Her attitude toward the appearance of family history was indeed the same as was her attitude toward her personal appearance, namely that she had not imagined it could matter to a living soul, either how she looked or how her marriage looked, to others.

  The problem was it hadn’t looked that odd to her. To my astonishment, she had not examined the eight-hundred-day hiatus very deeply at the time it occurred, nor had she done so since. It was an aberration, she conceded in her own terms, but no big deal, as Oscar would have put it.

  “Like taking a trip, he said. You know, you take a trip and then you want very much to come home.”

  “But things just aren’t done that way. It’s irresponsible,” I sputtered a bit.

  “He was not such a responsible guy always, your uncle Oscar. He was always out for fun. And he wasn’t having much, I couldn’t tell you why not.”

  “So he left you.”

  “Not at all. He went for a ride, that’s all. Now, Walter—now he has left me.”

  “It must have hurt a great deal, it must have been terrible at the time. Do you remember it?”

  “Of course. Do you think a woman forgets her own life? I remember everything, from the age of five or six. And I wasn’t such an old hen, you know, I was forty-four years old the year Brooklyn won the World Series. You know what else? I remember every game of that World Series too.”

  “So do I.”

  “Good. Come here, and I’ll show you what I looked like at the ripe old age of forty-four.”

  We went inside and she pretended (I thought) to rummage around after a particular photograph in a hatboxful of shots ranging from old brown-tints to four-at-a-crack carnival snaps to crummy modern polaroids. At last, “casually,” she dug it out and passed it to me, a color enlargement that could have been Rita Hayworth, or someone like that, in the early Fifties. A rich cloud of black-and-rust hair framed her handsome face; she wore one of those bell-shaped skirts that elaborate the hips, and a white cotton blouse.

  “Maybe that’s why he came back!” I exclaimed. I believe I was expected to marvel and so I did. This was at the same time contrived and absolutely candid. I may have contrived the utterance, yet the sentiment was perfectly genuine. In my recollection of those years, Aunt Tanya had looked no such way; she had been an avuncular appendage, the somewhat elderly lady who had married my mother’s brother and was therefore sometimes around on holidays.

  “Bubi, I know why he came back. It’s why he could leave I never figured out.”

  “You must have asked. He must have said.”

  “Oscar?”

  “He must at least have apologized.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, echoing the intonation of a phrase I associated particularly with Oscar himself. “He must have.”

  Tanya was being neither evasive nor coy. There was simply little to reveal. Oscar (as I apparently knew better than she) had left “for no reason”—quite explicitly—and in just that same spirit he had returned. For no reason, or none that could be given.

  Yet my uncle was more than a fundamentally decent man, he was an absolutely moral man, and so he could not have returned in a frivolous state of mind. I am sure he knew that coming back at all meant staying, and never walking away again, and I will wager he was giving that very matter a great deal of thought in the long silence between August and October of 1957. He would be returning for no reason other than that he wished to do so, to be there however in a spirit that was new—as though he had been there before under duress, or through circumstance, and would thenceforth be there by choice.

  “He was gone a long time. He must have had jobs, made friends—did you ever meet the people he knew at the time?”

  “I never saw Oscar’s friends. You know the kind of people he liked to run around with—horseplayers. He never brought them around. When Oscar came back, it was like he never left, except for the business. I tried to keep it going, hired help, but it had slacked off. The business depended on Oscar. When he came back he was surprised we still had it. He hadn’t taken the trouble to check up! And he didn’t want to build it back up again. He had a job—is this what you’re curious?—as a waiter. In a restaurant.”

  She spoke the word “restaurant” as some might say “cesspool,” or “whorehouse.” What a jolt it must have been to Oscar, his own wife looked down on waiters!

  “But he did it.”

  “Yes, eventually. And the business went back up, bigger than ever, so it was worth a little something when
he finally sold it. As you know, he retired at sixty-five anyway.”

  “Promptly.”

  Indeed Oscar and I had celebrated the occasion together. I was in my thirties and married by then, and I had long considered Oscar more than a relative—a friend. Retirement, so depressing a prospect to many, absolutely exhilarated him. In a sense he could walk away again after all. Not from Tanya (he had never walked away from her, I don’t think) but from a schedule, the things that hem one in. He went back to riding the ferryboats then, and playing the horses. As a matter of fact we celebrated his retirement in the clubhouse at Belmont Park. Oscar despised the new Aqueduct and never ceased to lament the closing of Jamaica. But if he knew a soul in that clubhouse, or if they knew him, it was not at all evident.

  “Prompt to the minute,” said Tanya. “He learned from his horses how to get quickly out of harness.”

  “Forgive me all my questions, Aunt Tanya, but I’d ask a hundred more if I knew what to ask. Is there any more to know, anything else to tell about that time?”

  “It was a long time ago. Not that I don’t remember it, but it is almost thirty years. You could have asked him.”

  “Oh I did. He never answered.”

  “Exactly. So you know I did. I will tell you one thing, though. Your uncle, despite being in the liquor business, never went in for drink, but he loved a good cigar. The biggest tragedy in Oscar’s life was the overthrow of Cuba. He didn’t have such a terrible hard life, you know. But in the year he went without his Havanas—maybe it was longer, year and a half—that was his biggest complaint. He tried the other ones. Brazilians, Canary Islands, and every damn thing. But he never stopped moaning about it until he made a connection.”

  “A connection?”

  “You know, black market. Until he got the cigars. And he was not disappointed in them, either, they were just what he wanted, and he never complained again, about anything, until his heart attacked him.”

  Tanya shuffled around in the top compartment of the hutch and produced two cedar cigar boxes bearing the seal of the Cuban government, now under Castro of course, and each containing fifty Rafael Gonzales Coronas. Proof that you can’t take it with you.

  “They will be fine,” she said, “each one fresh inside. Age won’t make a difference.”

  “For me? No, Tanya, thanks. I don’t smoke them.”

  “Smoke them the hell, Walter—you can sell them on the street anywhere in New York for five dollars apiece, maybe more. Right down here at the corner candy, it’s true. Havana Specials.”

  “You sell them, Tanya, or I could sell them for you. It’s your money.”

  “The money. No, if you don’t want them I’ll keep them around. They give off a nice smell, as long as you don’t light up.”

  Oscar had returned acting for all the world as though he had never gone, or as though he’d gone to work like any other day and returned on schedule. Honey, I’m home. As though a man was sent out for coffee, vanished for over two years, then walked in with the containers, sat down, and without one word of explanation began to sip his coffee. The missing years were simply missing: they didn’t exist anymore.

  Which led me on to further inquiries and eventually to a second pilgrimage, back to Oscar’s old haunts, to the place he lived during those years, 10 Battersea Street. But first came my quest for the missing persons, or the persons from the missing years. The most intriguing, and the most likely, was the woman I had actually seen at Oscar’s funeral—a very attractive woman in a dark suit whom no one had seemed to know. She had remained on the periphery of events and was never accounted for by any of the relatives. No one, myself included, much cared. At the time (ignorant of the daybooks, though I held them in my hand at graveside) I noticed her more for her striking good looks than anything else. I have never seen a woman my age, which I guessed her to be, who looked so stunning.

  Later I arrived at the theory that this mystery guest might well be Caddy Moore, or Caddy Ormsby-Gore by now; that either they had remained friends somehow, or perhaps, alternatively, that living in the city she had seen the notice in the newspaper and recognized the name. The name on the notice was not the one by which she had known him up to the time the journal left off, but for all I knew she had participated in his deliberations that autumn and knew the whole story.

  I preferred the theory that they had stayed in touch—that although Oscar never took his ten minutes in bed with her, he did take pride and keep tabs, and that no doubt she did fulfill his grand sense of her worth, her fate. I liked the idea very much, that there was a deep abiding affection between them, but neither was it a totally wild assumption. Their rapport may have been unique, but it did not strike me as trivial. And the woman I saw at the funeral service was someone, she was there, and although all my inquiries yielded no clue as to her identity (or because of that) it seemed all the more plausible she was Caddy. If not, then who else?

  I am no detective and my spare time is limited. Nonetheless I made, over the course of several weeks, every effort to locate the people who had known my uncle in his Fish incarnation. Wally Wiley, Mickey Klutz, Linda Stanley, Jimmy Myers: I was sure some of these people, perhaps all save Wiley, were still alive and would talk to me about those years and share their memories of Oscar. I did not even doubt he might have maintained those friendships too, after Sputnik, as there was nothing in his relation with Tanya to hinder him.

  I used the phone-books, chiefly, making hundreds of calls (that varied in oddness, I assure you) to homes listed under a correct surname and now and then the Christian name or first initial as well. I combed obituaries on microfilm at the New York Public Library, and thank Christ for alphabetization at least. With Jimmy Myers I went so far as to examine the lists of Vietnam War casualties (in case Oscar’s premonition had unhappily proved out) and found three of him. And in the end I wandered the city streets a bit; asked around at Belmont Park, at Aqueduct, and in the Battery Park environs.

  The result: the past was past fast, as Oscar articulated. The old guard was gone and little was retained in the changing over. I did find a Bulkitis who recalled the old news-stand (long since removed) and who told me that most of the family was now living in Connecticut. And Wes Farr, son of the trainers Will and Wesley Farr, recalled for me that his father did employ a girl, or maybe two of them, walking hots and swiping back in those days when it was still a great novelty. He could show me detailed records, Farr said, of every horse the stable had handled in New York State going back to 1946, but as for stable employees—the non-payroll people, hangers-on and part-timers—it was hopeless.

  The neighborhood from Fulton Street to Battery Park has changed, like everything else, and far from being able to walk through Oscar’s rooms (as I had naively imagined myself doing) I discovered the very street he stayed on was gone. It was this detail, the wholesale absence of Battersea Street, and Number 10, that lent to my proceedings an almost spectral aspect. In effect I was knocking on doors in a ghost-town, asking after Oscar’s shade—or the ghost of his ghost really, since the Oscar who had resided here was already half spirit, a displaced soul in earthly limbo.

  Time can take funny bounces on an errand of this kind. My sense of where in time and space I stood varied from moment to moment, as did my sense of who exactly I had set out to find. I had seen Oscar just six weeks prior to his death, for lunch, and I had talked with him over the phone even more recently, as we laid our Saratoga plans. These were fresh memories, as were the images of my uncle upstate last August, where my two boys and I shared a lakeside cottage with him a few miles from the Saratoga race course. That Oscar, heavily wrinkled, his eyes and hair gone iron-grey, a strong man now yielding to a gathering roundness in the middle and a new thinness in the arms and legs, was the Oscar I thought I knew. The only one.

  But in my searches I became aware that I perceived him as someone long gone—a long time dead—and I realized then that the real Oscar, the most current one that is, had been displaced by the old Oscar, the
one who came back to life in the pages he had accumulated for eight hundred days back in the 1950’s.

  I was not looking for Myers or Klutz or any of those people really, nor was I looking for Oscar Carnovsky, my uncle whom I knew so well. I was pursuing the other Oscar, Fish I suppose, a man I now knew even better and yet who lived so long ago, at a time when for a time I did not in fact know him at all.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1988 by Larry Duberstein

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-9384-3

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  LARRY DUBERSTEIN

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