by Peter Orner
“Two knocks,” he says. “And by the time he raised his knuckle for the third, I’d opened the door. ‘A message from the watch, sir. A boat, sir, three miles due north. Very small, sir. Could be an enemy boat, sir; then again, it might not be. Hard to tell, sir.’ I told the boy to can it. Some messengers don’t know when to take a breath and let you think. They think if you aren’t saying anything, you want to hear more, which is never true. Remember that. I went up to the bridge. ‘Wait,’ I told them. ‘Wait till we can see it. And ready the torpedoes,’ I told them, or something like that, I forget the lingo.”
“The torpedoes?” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “The torpedoes. I couldn’t make it out, but the chance that it wasn’t a hostile boat was slim. You see what I’m driving at?”
“I do, sir.”
“No, you don’t, sailor.”
“No, I don’t,” I say. “Don’t at all.”
“We’d been warned in a communiqué from the admiral to be on high alert for kamikaze flotillas. Do you have any idea what a kamikaze flotilla is?”
“Basically,” I say, “it hits the side of your boat, and whango.”
“You being smart with me? You think this isn’t life and death we’re talking about here?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“So I waited. It took about a half hour on auxiliary power for us to get within a quarter mile of the thing—then I could see it with the search.”
My grandfather pauses, opens his right-hand desk drawer, where he keeps a safety-locked pistol and a stack of pornographic comic books. They are strange books. In the cartoons men with long penises with hats on the ends of them and hair growing up the sides, so that to me they look like pickles, chase women with their skirts raised over their heads and tattoos on their asses that say things like Uncle Sam’s my daddy and I never kissed a Kaiser. He whacks the drawer shut and brings his hands together in front of his face, moves his thumbs around as if he’s getting ready either to pray or to thumb-wrestle. “Japs,” he says. “Naked Japs on a raft. A raftload of naked Jap sailors. Today the bleedyhearts would probably call them refugees, but back then we didn’t call them anything but Japs. Looked like they’d been floating for days. They turned their backs to the light, so all we could see were their backsides, skin and bone fighting it out and the bone winning hands down.”
I step back. I want to sit down, but I don’t. He stands and leans over his desk, examines my face. Then he points at the door, murmurs, “Bernice doesn’t know.” On a phone-message pad he scrawls, BLEW IT UP in capital letters. Whispers, “I gave the order.” He comes around the desk and motions to his closet. “We can talk in there,” he says, and I follow him into his warren of suits. My grandfather long ago moved all his clothes out of my grandmother’s packed-to-the-gills closets. He leaves the light off. In the crack of sun beneath the door I can see my grandfather’s shoes and white socks. He’s wearing shorts. He’d been practicing his putting in the driveway.
“At ease, sailor,” he says, and I kneel down amid the suits and dangling ties and belts. And I see now that it’s not how many times you hear a story but where you hear it that matters. I’ve heard this before, but this is the first time I’ve been in a closet alone with my grandfather.
“Why?” I say. “Why, if you knew it wasn’t—”
“Why?” he says, not as if he’s repeating my question but as if he really doesn’t know. He sighs. Then, still whispering even though we’re in the closet, he says, “Some men would lie to you. They’d say it’s war. I won’t lie to you. It had zero to do with war and everything to do with the uniform I was wearing. Because my job was to make decisions. Besides, what the hell would I have done with a boatload of naked Japanese? There was a war on.”
“But you just said—”
“Listen, my job. Just because men like me made the world safe for men like your father to be cowards doesn’t mean you won’t ever blow up any civilians. Because you will. I do it once a week at the bank.” He places a stumpy, powerful hand on my shoulder. “Comprende?”
“Never,” I breathe. “Good,” he says, and we are standing in the dark and looking at each other, and the story is the same and different—like last time, except this time his tears come so fast they’re like lather. He blows his nose into his hand. I reach and offer him the sleeve of one of his suit jackets. “I’ll let myself out,” he says, and leaves me in the confessional, closing the door behind him.
I don’t imagine anything, not even a hand that feels like a fish yanking my ankle. Another door opens. “Seymour? Seymour?” my grandmother says. “Where’s the kid?”
The House on Lunt Avenue
IT IS EARLY Monday morning on Lunt Avenue, Rogers Park, Chicago. November 1954. Seymour Burman shouts at his son Philip, the boy who will become my father. It is ten before seven and Seymour’s anger smells of Scotch. Philip is eighteen and has flunked out of the University of Illinois. He lies on his old bed with a pillow over his face. The room stinks of filthy socks. Seymour paces the sliver of room not taken up by the bed. The floor creaks beneath the frayed carpet, which was once green but is now the stagnant brown of the puddles that lie near the sewers along Lunt Avenue waiting to be frozen by December. Philip lifts the pillow from his face and yawns.
“And tomorrow?” Seymour lifts a big cordovan leather shoe and stamps it for emphasis. It doesn’t resound. This house. In a part of his brain not currently outraged by his slothful son, he decides, once and for all, the time has come to buy a place in the north suburbs.
“Don’t you have to go to work?” Philip says.
“You’re a miserable lazy.”
Philip props himself against the headboard. “Tomorrow. For Christ sake, I said tomorrow.”
“You think it’s all free? Is that what?”
“What?”
Seymour flaps his arms. “This! This!”
Philip rolls his eyes and looks out the window. Even on this rare, bright November morning, the sunlight hardly creeps into the room because the house next door is so close, a proximity that used to be this room’s single consolation. Millie Finkle’s bedroom window is no more than ten feet away. Millie was in the class ahead of him at Sullivan and mostly ignored him. There were nights, though, when he caught her figure against the light, behind the pulled shade. But Millie is gone now, an Alpha Something Phi at Wisconsin, and already engaged to a darling handsome boy studying law at Northwestern. This information courtesy of Mrs. Finkle, whispering in his mother’s ear at the market. So now the possibility across the way is back to being a window, and Philip is home again, a disgrace to the family.
“This is unacceptable!” Seymour booms.
“Give it a rest.”
“You think I joke. I’ll call a locksmith.” He bolts from the room, pounds down the stairs—for a stocky man, he moves fast—and grabs his fur hat off the front hall table. The house shakes after the slam of the front door, then is calm. Philip shuts his eyes and in a moment is nearly asleep, thinking not of Millie but of where she lives now. Soft bodies in an enormous foggy bathroom. White cream on faces, scurrying legs.
In pajama bottoms and no shirt, Philip wanders the house. His little sister, Esther, must be at school. His mother is probably teaching dance. The house stands, silent and empty, except for his grandmother, who never leaves the guest room anyway. He stops by the door and listens to her cranky breathing. She’s awake. Grandma Rachel breathes like that, as if she’s asleep, even when she’s not, even while she sits and stares at nothing. She’ll never die. He doesn’t knock.
There’s a note from his mother on the kitchen table. (Four dollars is enclosed.) “Two roast beef sandwiches in the fridge. In wax paper, behind the tomato juice. Have a wonderful day! Ignore the Admiral. He’s just letting out hot air. If he doesn’t exhale, he’ll explode all over. He does love you. By the way, they’re hiring at Goldy’s, so you might be able to get your old job back. Hint. Hint. Kisses.”
Bernice stands before the mirr
or in the ballet studio above Al Fonroy’s Shirts and Slacks on Touhy Avenue. Sweat pours down her neck and chest, soaking the front of her leotard. Her mind is on nothing but her flexibility and the power of her own legs. She stretches in the mirrors, which double her image to infinity. There’s nothing else in the world but this movement. Even at this small-time level. Yes, yes, there was a time when bigger was possible. Before Seymour, the children, and the war. This Seymour can’t take away. The great Lincoln Kirstein himself watched her dance in a Ruth Page production of Frankie and Johnny. And after the show—she remembers this often—while the Russian girls were tittering a mile a minute, he approached her without introduction (his huge forehead gleaming) and said, simply, “Why not come to New York? I’ve started a school.” And she almost went. Even now visions of dancing “Morning, Noon, and Night” at the Capitol Theatre invade her dreams. She extends her arms, slides, runs a step, a grand fouetté right, then half-turns. Pauses, opens her legs wide, turns into a slow leap, and muffs a tour jeté. Lands, turns, slides, slides, shuffles left, and is about to leap again—
“Bernice?”
“Yes.”
“Your son’s here.”
She grips the bar and raises her leg slowly. In the mirror she examines the thin wrinkles that are now etched below her eyes like tiny veins in a marble pillar.
Philip will learn. She knows this. He’ll catch on. He’ll go to work. They always do. And thank God. They couldn’t possibly not work. What would we do with them if they didn’t? But this doesn’t mean the need won’t go on. Her men. Esther has never had this. Always an independent young thing. Esther, who used to love getting lost in the vast shoe section of Marshall Field’s, who would try on big men’s shoes and waddle around and quack at anyone who’d listen to her. Her daughter still thinks this life’s not a defeat. But the men have always been different. Even Seymour, for all his bluster, couldn’t find the ears in his head if she wasn’t around to tell him where they were. And no matter how far they stray, they always return, guilty smiles spread across their mouths, begging for forgiveness, eyes to the floor. Seymour came back from the war terrified of his own children. Esther’s crying in the night used to send him over the edge of the bed. Man overboard! They should have sent women. Women wouldn’t have come back sentimental. Drop the bomb and be done with it. And Philip’s the same. He’ll pull himself together. But like his father, there’s something missing in him. Warmth, some courage, even love surface in both of them from time to time. Still, something’s not there. She slides again, leaps, and tries another tour jeté, this one a little better. She knows the moment she lands, so easy. You don’t even need talent. Only a little grace. The room begins to fill with other dancers. Bernice mops her neck with a towel.
“Tell him I’m teaching. Tell him my purse is on the bench in the backroom.”
Tuesday morning, and the tweed coat doesn’t fit and smells of Pall Malls. Philip Burman looks like a kid playing dress-up. The coat is left over from his high-school days, and it didn’t fit well even then. A hand-me-down from his Uncle Wallace. Wallace was ten years younger than Seymour, closer in age to his nephew than to his brother. The story goes that he laughed a lot—out loud—deep belly laughs that made the rest of the family nervous. The other legend is that it wasn’t just a heart attack that dropped Wallace dead at thirty-eight, but also the stormy intensity of my grandfather to excel, to expand, to go public. Wallace was famous for failing. He didn’t pay attention to unpaid balances. He neglected details, forgot appointments, always ran late. He sired only daughters.
On the El, Philip tugs his sleeves in an attempt to stretch the coat’s arms. The knot under his chin is excruciatingly tight, but he knows if he loosens his tie his father will notice right away. Today he will suffer it. The other people on the subway stare straight ahead or out the window at the tar-paper roofs of stores and the back porches of rambling tenements. Their bundled shoulders jolt with every lurch of the train.
At the office Philip examines claims. He makes check marks. His job is to search for inconsistencies. In the numbers, in the descriptions of the accidents, in the words of his father, which liar did what to the other liar? He shuffles his feet under his table. The office is cold, and he bounces his legs to keep his feet warm. The place is so silent that the flap of the turning of papers gets on his nerves. Washing out the fat drawer at Goldy’s beat this. Fred and Myron yammering about the price of hog whatevers and beans.
The one bright spot is his father’s secretary. Her name is Shirl. Not Shirley. She’s already corrected him twice. “Only my mother calls me Shirley and she lives in Toledo.” She’s got on a thin print dress that is too short and summery for the weather. She’s got plump cheeks and sighs a lot.
Behind Shirl, beyond the closed office door, Seymour sits at his desk, a paperweight gripped in his hand. Just before lunch he often daydreams about the war. Today, in a starchy uniform and creased leather-brimmed hat, he struts the bridge. The captain. Of all the guys on the ship, there’s only one guy who’s captain. He thinks about shaking Jackie Cooper’s hand at Nouméa, New Caledonia. How many men can say they held Jackie Cooper’s sweaty palm in theirs?
Seymour’s lackey, a very tall, timid, small-eyed man named Roger Craigson, has the office to the right of his boss. Craigson’s door is open. It’s Craigson who gives Philip work. He approaches Philip’s little table, blinking profusely, forcing a smile.
“Howz it?”
“I guess all right. I found some inconsistent things.”
“Excellent. Let’s have a look at your effort.” Much is not said. Craigson is wary of the boss’s kid. Craigson had a wife once, but she ran, and now he wears this humiliation in the smile that juts out both edges of his mouth like twin scars. He’s prepared for any kind of insult—he’s endured them all—and he looks at Philip and waits for him to say something snide. But Philip says nothing, just points to what he’s found and waits for Craigson to leave so he can stare more at Shirl’s breasts, which project from her chest like the prows of attacking ships. She types like a banshee. The letters whack the paper as if she’s punching a bag.
Seymour’s door bangs open. “I’ll be at the Berghoff,” he says. Shirl nods and looks curiously at Philip, who—she’d noticed—looked down immediately at the sight of his father.
“I just wanted to talk to you,” Philip says. “Outside the office.” The bartender clinks glasses, hums a silent song to himself. He’s shrivel-faced and small, so tiny only his head bobs above the bar, like a begging child. He looks at my father and sucks his cheeks. The place is called the Charlie Boo’s: nothing more than a cramped narrow room, hardly more than the bar itself, some stools and green and brown bottles in front of a mirror. A jukebox is jammed against the far wall. There’s one guy at the end who looks as if he’s counting his fingers, over and over.
It is Thursday evening, four blocks from the office. Philip has followed Shirl.
“Look. I don’t want to be harsh, but you’re a kid. Not only are you a kid, but you’re the honcho’s kid.”
“I just wanted to talk to you. Without Craigson’s eyes.”
Shirl sighs and glances at herself in the mirror, nudges her hair. “Don’t think about him. He’s a dopey. Worry about the honcho.” She looks at the door. “Look, anyway, I’m waiting for somebody.”
Philip, his hands in his lap, rubs his thumbs together. “I’ll wait with you until your friend comes,” he says.
“Uy yuy yuy,” she says, warming to him. She orders two beers from the little bartender.
The bartender looks doubtfully at Philip and winks at Shirl.
“The kid trailed me.”
“You want me to take him by the ear?”
“I’m twenty-five,” Philip says, and puts a ten-dollar bill on the table.
“I’m Adlai Stevenson,” the bartender says, and places two glasses before them.
“Thank you, Boo Bear,” Shirl says. She has a slight double chin, a second layer of skin soft
ly rounds and dips below her jaw. She turns to Philip. “So you flunked out of school and now you’re working for Daddy.”
“Not for long.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Something else.”
“Does the big guy know?”
“Screw him,” Philip says. “It doesn’t matter. I’m getting my own place. And a different job. So—” Shirl laughs and leans into the bar, tips over a glass with her elbow. A foamy stream nearly flows over the bar, but Philip blocks it with his sleeve before it has a chance to drop and spill all over her dress.
Shirl rattles the bar. Says, “What about a little whiskey for the babe in the woods?”
She lives on the third floor of a walk-up on North Pratt. They get off the El and walk along streets lined with dirty plowed snow that looks like piled ash. Now bundled in Wallace’s beer-stained coat, Shirl marches ahead. Philip follows in shirtsleeves, quietly shivering, fearful of saying the wrong thing and being sent home. It is after midnight and they’ve been drinking for hours. Across the street from Shirl’s building is a construction site, a large pit ringed by earth-moving machines that look to Philip like giant sleeping dinosaurs. Shirl flings open the lobby door. He watches her bare red ankles as she tromps up the stairs.
Shirl unlocks her door and leads him into a black hall. She turns on the light. “This is where I live,” she says. He blinks, and through the purple light in his eyes he sees a green couch and a metal card table. She flicks the light off. “You saw it. There it was.” She leads him, clackety-clacking, through a dark room to a bed twice the size of the one in his own room. She pushes him onto to it, kisses him, then rolls over and pulls her dress over her head. He places his hands on Shirl’s coarse bra and shuts his eyes. The bed twirls. Shirl unbuttons his shirt, kisses him again, and bites his lip with a pointy incisor. He grabs her shoulders and squeezes. His feet begin to thaw.