Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  His mother then, still alive in East Boston, still young for that matter at fifty-two, gave me a cup of coffee. She was a pleasant enough woman whose life seemed far from terrible. She was living alone in rented rooms but had a boyfriend, a car, and a steady job at the Prince of Donuts. She didn’t look bad at all, not a drinker. But she did not feel so very maternal toward my old friend. “A bum,” she summarized. “He got his.”

  I was stunned. “You knew him best,” I said, sounding like television I’m afraid. “You must have known the side of him that was beautiful.”

  Her laughter came at me so sharply, so derisively, that I nearly ducked. Of course I had richly earned it with my purple prose. I hadn’t meant to go sappy, but I was truly shocked by her venom and responded stupidly. “I haven’t seen him, or talked to him, or wanted to see him or talk to him in years,” she said now.

  “He loved you very much,” I said, still stupid, having not yet shaken the germ. I would have bet my last buck Harpo had been simply grand to his old lady—the generous and loving son if nothing else—and that she in turn would defend his name against all comers. He might have knifed the old man but he would absolutely reverence the mother, this much I knew. So much for Sigmund Freud and so much for me and my Reportorial Instincts.

  “You been sneaking too much rum at your desk, friend. That kid was a gutterball from the cradle to the grave. A block of ice behind his lungs, where most people have some kind of heart. Harpo? Look, don’t take my word for it, ask Cathy. Ask his wife.”

  His wife! The Harp Takes A Bride—impossible yet wonderful to contemplate. He had never looked at girls, not even the ones who chose to hang with the hoods, and there were more than a few. Not the prettiest ones exactly, the way you might see it told in the movies, but some with sex appeal and spunk. (Ellen Morrison, for my money, put all the good girls to shame.) Did not appeal to Harpo, however, or if they did he never showed it. It was as though girls stood outside his code, compromised him somehow. He did surprise me one morning when a new girl appeared in Cerasoli’s homeroom; grinned at me and made the hourglass shape with his palms. Never before and never again such a reference as that, so I had him for a connoisseur, bloodless judge of talent who knew a good figure when he saw one yet disdained the hunt absolutely.

  Now a wife. An interlude, at least, of normalcy and affection. If this Cathy had married him, she must have loved him, believed in him once and maybe still, despite the mother’s surmise, for they were still man and wife when The Harp drew his last parking ticket out at the beach.

  Cathy Berkowitz lived in an apartment five minutes’ walking distance from the high school and once more I registered with some deflation that Harpo had not gone far. But it isn’t all tinsel, folks, and whatever else you may hear in America today there is still nothing beats a true love and a strong close family tie. If Harpo had that, well then maybe he had done something unexpected after all. Which is why they say “if” is the biggest little word in the language.

  Cathy hadn’t seen his face in six years, which was incidentally the age of their kid. And worse, like the mother, she felt well shed of him, so low had she banked the fires in her heart. The kid was named Kid—named like a fighter I suppose, Kid Berkowitz—except he didn’t look to be much of a fighter. A dreary little sack of seed who, I soon learned, had never met his progenitor, never even been shown a picture. Having only just begun school, he might not even know kids had fathers if not for the TV, where come to think of it they often as not don’t have fathers, what with art mirroring life and all.

  “I’m changing his name,” Cathy told me. “From Kid, I mean.”

  “To what?”

  “If I had a good one, I’d done it already. But I’m going to—both names.”

  “Last name too?”

  “Cause now I can remarry, you see. I couldn’t remarry without a divorce and the son of a bitch wouldn’t let me have that cause then he’d have to pay me money. He was smart and selfish to the end, Harpo.”

  “I’d change it as soon as possible if I were you. Once they are in school, you know, the name gets locked in. I mean the first name—” (I did not want to rush her on the last name, having obtained the clearest conviction that Harpo’s mother would remarry sooner than his wife.)

  “Any suggestions?” she said.

  “Names? No. I kind of like Kid to be honest with you. Or maybe Harp the Second. To me nothing else goes with Berkowitz.”

  “You can say that again.”

  I went to the cops. It helps to be on the paper, so you know your way with them a little. There are two or three guys down there who don’t give a damn anymore, meaning they might give a reporter the time of day. Virgil Lewis I would even call a friend—I’d stood him a few beers and vice-versa I’m sure—but Virge wasn’t from these parts, he grew up out in Springfield. To him, the Harpo Berkowitz I described was a pure figment; he knew all about the real one.

  “He was a punk, a delivery man. Really, that’s it.”

  “A collector?”

  “Probably a collector. He was tough enough.”

  “A trigger?”

  “Can’t be sure there. You prefer a yes or a no?”

  “Not sure myself. But listen, he was big enough news to get his ass blown away, he must have been more than small beer to somebody.”

  “You think so? You think these guys are rational or something?”

  I did. In a way, rational. Not your well-read scholar exactly, or your concerned citizen, but rational in the sense they would know the butter from the margarine.

  “These guys are just terrorists. Lunatics with guns and muscle. Truly, this Berkowitz is not a story worth your time, anymore than a garbage collector, or a seagull at the dump.”

  I couldn’t do a thing with the seagull. No story. Yet I was credulous to the end, because I knew this guy, and knew him not as an infant in his crib but at eighteen, with his habits and gestures shaped for life. There had to be more to it.

  “Just one last thing, Virge, one simple answer and I’ll get out of here. Who?”

  “Who did him?”

  “No. Well, maybe. Who employed him? Who’d he work for?”

  “Hey, you want to end up getting yourself unpacked at the beach too?”

  The salient thing with your modern-day syndicate man, the guy at or near the top, is this incredibly serious commitment to the idea of appearing normal. He wants to barbecue out back with the neighbors, get his kids into private school, go to the theatre with friends. He does his hardest work building up this normalcy front and one result is that you can find him, his telephone is even listed, although like anyone else normal he won’t stay on the line too long with a stranger, least of all the Fourth Estate.

  “It’s about a dead man, you better speak to my lawyer,” said Frankie Call, The Barge Man, who according to Virgil Lewis filed W-2 for Harpo Berkowitz.

  “Believe me, it doesn’t call for anything like that. I’ve got no axe to grind with anyone, I’m just trying to understand something. Come on, let me buy you a cannoli.”

  “Funnyman. What did you say you write?”

  “Metro and County, Section Two. The human interest stories.”

  “Berko was human interest? I never even knew he was human.”

  “See, you’re funny too. Come on, sir, give me five minutes. I’ll drive to you.”

  “Oh, it’s a favor you’re doing me now, I’ll save on gas?”

  “You can always use a friend at Metro and County.”

  “Right, sure. All right, Jimmy Olsen Cub Reporter. Come to my house Sunday. Ten a.m., come around back to the pool. Bring a bug and you might get wet. Kiss your kids good-bye, just in case what they say about me is true.”

  “I don’t have any kids.”

  “Kiss the dog, Olsen. I’m just kidding you, remember?—we’re funny. I don’t threaten people, I’m in real estate, I deal with people, a busy man, give you two minutes of my time.”

  “Three,” I said, in case it wa
s procedurally correct to bargain.

  “One,” said The Barge Man, closing the deal. But he sounded soft to me, the same way Harpo always had. Maybe they were all like that, full of the milk of human kindness with no way to express it except through the love of opera.

  Call actually met me alone. Not really I’m sure; believe it, I was posing in somebody’s crosshairs every second. I wasn’t about to reach inside my jacket for a pen or a cigar, and even then I found myself hoping they didn’t kill for mere sport on Sunday.

  But he stood alone, slim and elegantly dressed in a brown suit, with the weary attentiveness of a parimutuel clerk. He looked down at my hand as though it was barely visible, certainly nothing to touch, then remarked that I looked “big enough to be a cop” and I told him I had a brother who was one, out in Sacramento. He said he didn’t care, real estate men weren’t afraid of cops. Then he made a nice little speech for me, with one wing-tip shoe propped casually on the diving board. (The truth: he was wearing Reeboks, same as me.)

  “You want to understand life. All right, let’s pretend I know it all. Let’s say I tell you a story about this fellow Berkenstall—is that the name you mentioned? I tell you he ripped off some goods wasn’t his to rip off and so Billy The Q placed him inside a car for it, relocated him if you will. Say that Billy the Q was on retainer for such small chores as that and didn’t even receive a penny candy for his troubles, where you guys are always writing ten thousand and twenty thousand and the sky’s the limit. Now what if it was all just exactly that way and I knew it and told it all to you? Would it make you understand life any better? I’m curious to know.”

  His frankness blew me away. I was certain he had just supplied me with the literal scenario for Harpo’s end. It was a show of absolute confidence in his normalcy front, as though nothing could touch him now, least of all reality. And I think he expected me to be entertained, amused, in any case satisfied—and to agree there was nothing to be learned, even with every fact in hand.

  God knows why he’d consented to talk in the first place. Maybe just to stretch out his own curiosity and daring, maybe to show his humanity (that although he rigged the dice he could still feel sympathy with the players in the game) or possibly he had a simple egoistic enjoyment of his own strong-arm charm and liked to roll the power off his palate with one foot up on the diving board. Whatever it was, was gone. By now—and it really was one minute—he bore an unmistakable look of retrospective surprise at his own munificence, that signalled a definite end to it. He was still as a waxwork and the air around him seemed terribly still; the unnaturally blue water in the pool did not move a molecule.

  “Didn’t you like him, though?” I asked, ignoring the cues for silence, for I was after a different sort of accounting than the one he had offered.

  “What’s that?” The Barge Man snapped awake, startled to find me there fully thirty seconds after he had stilled the water.

  “Harpo. That’s what I really wanted to know. Did you like him, personally.”

  “Like a son,” he blandly assured me. “If I ever met him.”

  And that’s about the whole itinerary, every place I went and everyone with anything to say, the complete wrap-up on Harpo Berkowitz. I have omitted such memorable stops as the one I made at Pete’s Eats, where Harpo took his ham and eggs every morning. Asked for a word or two, an anecdote, the handful of regulars could barely muster a shrug among them. Needless to say I had no story. Nothing, said Harry Eamon, could be less of a story, and so I spent a month down on the South Shore covering polluted water as a penance, notes and quotes on coliforms.

  Harpo Berkowitz was never so prosaic. Was I going too far to see him as an artist?—one whose discipline happened to be force, or terror, and who like so many artists in other disciplines had done his best work early on and was doomed to a reiteration of the themes? It was not a line I’d try on Harry E., who would call it a crock and a half before he hit the first comma.

  So the morning line held: Harpo would go down as a punk, who had lived and died the pre-ordained life of the punk. A guy whose own mother despised him, whose only talent was that fearless existential muscle we had seen in the parking lot, in the woodshop, and once in the hallway outside the school cafeteria when The Harp came up on two pretty big boys and smilingly cracked their skulls together like cocoanuts.

  “Your friend is deranged,” I was informed by one of the cocoanuts that day, referring to the detail that he neither knew his assailant nor had provoked him in any way. “He’s no better than a rabid dog.”

  Harpo himself recalled the moment for me a day later and having had the leisure to sleep on it, he did so with a gentle, almost wistful pride and pleasure. Certainly he was not chagrined that the act had been gratuitous. “I always wanted to try that,” he drolly confessed, “and those two were born to be the ones.”

  The Street Where You Live

  It is hard for me to ignore Frank Barlow, the tall handsome man who sits down in our street and wails there like a forlorn captive animal. The sounds he makes are inexact, not language, although bits of English do emerge from his inner music.

  But here, I’ll tell you what I know of the man. There are days when he limps terribly or even crawls along the curb, and yet it is perfectly usual to see him later the same day going along at a brisk pace, covering miles. He does cover miles every single day (the same miles, over and over) to no discernible purpose beyond the motion itself. Relentlessly tracking his private demons, I guess: downtown, back up to the river, across the railroad bridge both ways, then downtown again. We happen to be on his route.

  I have seen him sleeping at night, in Trapelo Park and in the dimly lit foyer of the Harry S. Truman high-rise, but Frank is mostly on the move. Movement is his calling now, whatever it may have been before. And I should mention the rituals—unbuttoning and buttoning his coat, plus a kind of ceremonial unloading and repacking of his gunny sack that approaches autism in the simple pointless repetition. Much of this behavior is entered in the record, by chance, near our front steps, but it’s the stuff we don’t see that really fascinates. Frank has a lawyer, Frank cashes a monthly check.

  He will never meet your eyes. If his path bodes a geometric intimacy with your own, he will veer, early and gracefully. He can see trouble coming, in other words, or society coming, I suppose. Speak and he will pretend he hasn’t heard you, though it’s always possible he does not hear, in one sense or another. It’s as though a shell, a bubble, has been cast around him and yet he has this lawyer, cashes a check, eats.

  You see, I have become peripherally involved with the question of Frank Barlow, who knows why? Plenty of others have managed to look the other way. To most of them, Frank is at best an unsightly reminder and at worst a frightening apparition from the downside of the American Dream. He is what can happen, what has happened, and he is right there in your face every day. “Too damn bad it’s a free country!” I heard one neighbor say, as if he’d rather they kept Frank under a rock somewhere.

  One assumes Frank is unhappy. It would be difficult to project any positive emotions onto his quirky ceaseless ramble, other than to note that he does ramble, and maybe that alone indicates hope. Maybe he believes instinctively he is “getting somewhere,” whether to a good place in his past or something better on up the road. But I feel certain Frank would not want to be kept under a rock, because even on its most elemental level freedom itself is clearly what he loves. Movement. In this regard he is a true American.

  Guessing his age at forty, one considers the possibility he coughed up his sanity in Vietnam; he may be a damaged veteran and therefore that sort of “true American” too. It’s not unlikely, though it does not quite jibe with one prominent and intriguing fact I have learned about Frank Barlow, namely that he is the son of wealth—the Barlows of Beacon Hill, no less. This I found out firsthand the day I rescued him from the snowbank last winter.

  I almost left him there. It was just Frank after all—the familiar layers of shabby blan
kets, the battered brown shoes—except that I saw bright blood shining on the snow by his ear. Snowchips stuck to his beard and lashes, and even with his eyes shut he wore a look of terrible anguish. His fist unrolled and I saw a crumpled note. Rosebud? No, there were two names and two telephone numbers on the sheet, Attorney Ben Chasen and Alice Barlow, the Beacon Hill society woman.

  Everyone knew about the lawyer, for that detail surfaced whenever someone sought to have Frank removed from view. I suppose we knew he had a mother, too, but not really—and not anyone like an Alice Barlow. From her public image, it seemed as unlikely she would have a child as he a mother, and highly unlikely they should each be such to one another. Yet they were.

  I called the ambulance first that day, of course, then Chasen and Mrs. Barlow, leaving messages with functionaries of each. Chasen phoned that night to thank me. “It was thoughtful of you to call Frank’s mother,” he said in rather a warm voice, as though he mistook me for a family friend, or else for a second forgot I existed at all and was just talking to himself. But when I tried politely to further my knowledge of the situation, how things stood with Frank, the curtain came down quickly. “He’ll be fine,” Chasen told me. “In fact he has already been released from hospital and it’s largely thanks to you, Mr. Glazier.”

  Frank was “fine”—that was his situation. Client confidentiality, and perhaps simple good manners, forbade my knowing more. But wasn’t there another point of view? If this man was going to hurl himself upon the mercy and charity of the community, as a vagabond wanderer, intruder in the dust of our streets, would it not help those few who were sympathetic to him if they could know the nature of his difficulties?

  Thus I retained the unlisted number and tried several times to reach his mother, identifying myself in diminuendo as a friend, as someone who knew her son, someone who had helped her son, someone. The functionaries stood firm. When a gift arrived for me in the mail (a gold wristwatch, with a note card, “In appreciation of your help, best wishes”) I knew Alice Barlow would not be coming to the phone. Short of attempting to bribe the downstairs butler, I had reached a dead end there.