The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “I don’t know about Carmelite hobbits,” said Harrow. “But I know classy.”)

  Abbie had acceded to the name largely because he had no better suggestion. And in fact, he was surprised to find that it wasn’t even an altogether terrible plan. The land was scrubby and overgrown, but it was ideally perched on a high outlook with the six hundred wooded acres of Frick Park behind it and the river below; it afforded a nice view of the Homestead High Level Bridge, and from certain spots on a clear day you could see down the river in the other direction as far as the top of the Thunderbolt at Kennywood Park. The old Homestead Works on the other side of the river was a ruin, a rotting monument to a lost economy, but there were already rumors that the city might annex the whole thing with Superfund monies, tear it down, and build a shopping complex. When Veronica had first described the project (in broad strokes, in Harrow’s words, a view from 30,000 feet), Abbie had imagined a lazy subdivision full of sidewalkless streets curling back on themselves and stuffed with cul-de-sacs as if a den of Ouroboroses had been infected by a plague of commas, but the layout she’d finally shown him wasn’t actually terrible; it obeyed, more or less, a logic of blocks, with a central avenue and a small, albeit inevitably weedy and sure-to-be unused park in the center. Its flaw was straightforward. If it were to be built, it could not be built on forty-degree inclines. The whole hilly plot would have to be leveled. And there was nowhere for all that land to go but over the last hillside and down the steep slope into the gully of Nine Mile Run.

  It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a matter for the Zoning Board, and the hearing, officially, was to approve the new street layout and the request to reclassify the newly divided lots as residential (a mix, specifically, of R1 RSD-2 single family detached low density and RST RSA-3 single family attached multi-unit medium density), but the planning commission, at that time headed by a shambolic attorney by the name of Lou DiPresta, known colloquially as Tee-Time Lou, would approve anything as long as the City Traffic Engineer signed off (and the City Traffic Engineer always signed off, lest he find himself having to read what he was signing off on). And the planning commission, at the time, permitted no public comment. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania DEP and DCNR had no jurisdiction within the city limits under the Home Rule Charter unless a project presented a “grossly negligent and demonstrable danger to surrounding communities or a manifestly intentional violation of the Commonwealth’s laws of Environmental Protection and/or the Conservation of Natural Resources”—a standard so impossibly high as to have never once been applied successfully since the revision of the Home Rule Charter laws in 1972.

  The Zoning Board, by contrast, and much to the dismay of Joe Termini, had been obliged to conduct all of its hearings publicly subsequent to various minor apocalypses of urban planning in the fifties and sixties, most especially the razing of the Lower Hill District to make room for the Civic Arena. There had also been the destruction of the East Liberty commercial corridor; the old neighborhood center had been imprisoned in a peripheral boulevard that might as well have been a moat. The city had built a gaggle of obscene public housing high-rises along that same periphery, only to add to the impression that the neighborhood had been redesigned as a Bastille in which to imprison Dangerous Black People. Termini was of the general opinion that if only the preceding generation had wised up and given the Blacks some meaningless and superficial gestures of respect for their historic quarters of the city, then they’d be making a lot less fuss and trouble now. Instead, everyone went in with bulldozers and a barely concealed language of sanitation, and as a result Joe Termini—who didn’t, he was quite certain, have a racist bone in his body—was forced to endure a weekly pilgrimage of half-informed ministers and community leaders (he pronounced this phrase, every time, as if it were encased in flashing quotation marks) peddling a furious and often befuddling form of civic discontent.

  But it wasn’t just the city’s dispossessed African-American population, who, even Termini would admit, “had some pretty goddamn legitimate gripes.” Since the Zoning Board began working in public, it had become the main forum for any aggrieved citizens who couldn’t get a letter to the editor in the paper and couldn’t get their dumb state rep to return their frustrated calls. Most of their grievances had exactly fuck-all to do with zoning. They complained about police and they complained about their neighbors putting the trash out on the wrong day and they complained that the storm drains backed up into their basements. They complained about the mayor and the city council and the small claims court judges and the magistrate who upheld their sons’ DWIs when he’d only had a couple and he just forgot to turn on his headlights is all. They believed that the government had closed the steel mills and the coke plants. They took these same complaints to City Council meetings, too, but council didn’t have to conduct its business in public; their meetings were bread and circuses; their decisions were already made before they trundled out of their chambers. Joe Termini had two black women and one red-diaper Jew on his board, all political appointees like him, and they wouldn’t hear of working behind closed doors. (In his opinion, they weren’t much for working, period, but then, neither was he if he was honest about it. Twenty years in a mill and then ten years as Business Agent of the Local listening to mill workers bitch that the mills were closing was all the work he intended to do in a lifetime.) So here he was, conducting group therapy for people with nothing else to do in the middle of a weekday but express their vague discontent. “Don’t you fucking people have jobs?” he wanted to shout; sometimes he did shout it—never in meetings. “Oh Joe,” his wife said. “Put a sock in it. Have a beer.”

  “Phil,” said Joe. Harrow and Abbie took seats at the table.

  Behind them, a group of well-meaning citizens led by a thin man with wire glasses angled for chairs, but Termini held up a thick hand and said, “Gentlemen, ladies, please. Grab some seats in the front row over there. We’ll get to you when we get to you.”

  The thin man made an indignant sound between a laugh and a gurgle and led his troupe to the spot Termini had indicated. Termini rolled his eyes in a gesture of friendly conspiracy at Harrow and Abbie.

  “Hey, Joe,” said Harrow, “nice to bump into you.”

  “Yeah, we gotta stop meeting in these disreputable type of joints.” He winked at the nearest board member on his left, Tonya Weston, who made a point of treating Joseph Termini with the same benign indifference that an old cat shows the big dumb dog with whom she’s shared a house for most of her life. “Who’s your friend?” Termini asked.

  “Joe Termini, Abbie Mayer.”

  Termini threw a half wave across the table. “Mayer? So you’re related to this guy’s boss.” He grinned at Harrow.

  “Partner,” said Harrow.

  “I’m just giving you a hard time, Phil. Christ.” This time Termini offered the wink to Abbie. He grinned. “We all know who’s got who by the balls, though, don’t we?” He laughed: a bark.

  “She’s my sister,” Abbie said.

  “I can see the resemblance,” Termini replied. Abbie seemed to wince, and Termini wondered if he’d taken the comment as some kind of Jew thing. “I don’t mean like a Jewish thing,” he said.

  “No,” said Abbie.

  “Gentlemen,” said Zeb Rosen. Rosen was a criminal defense attorney by trade who’d wormed his way onto the board through some mysterious favor to Mayor Flaherty back in the seventies and who’d clung to the seat ever since. Caliguiri could’ve gotten rid of him but had seemed to find some indefinable use in having “a man of the left” on the board. He was short, fat, and diabetic, which made him temperamental in vague relation to his blood sugar level, and he made a vicious pain-in-the-ass of himself at every hearing, even though he inevitably and invariably cast his vote with whatever majority Termini managed to cobble together. This made him an effective ally, and Joe hated the feeling that he was indebted to the man.

  “Yeah, all right,” Joe said. “Let’s get started.” He glanced at the binder in fr
ont of him. “Okay, let’s see, uh, Madam Secretary, you ready?”

  Bernice Brownlee glared at him from the far end of the table. “Mr. Chairman,” she said.

  Fuck her, he thought. She cast dissenting votes into the record just to fuck with his preference for unanimity and took lousy minutes.

  “Ohhhhh-kay,” he said. He put a pair of small glasses on the end of his nose. Fuck getting old. He said, “Okay, in the next item, we are, uh, considering the proposal by MH Partners LLP for—uh, is this projected?” He glanced behind him. It was the previously reviewed project, a new circular driveway at a private school in Shadyside. “Can we get the transparency right?” he called toward the back of the room. A skinny young man in a suit that was too big for his chest and too short for his long arms rushed over and futzed around with the projector. The site plan appeared, crooked. Joe drummed the table. The kid straightened it.

  “Okay, okay,” Joe began again. “The proposal by MH Partners LLP to reclassify as, uh, varying residential a parcel . . . excuse me, parcels, contiguous parcels, which are currently . . .” He trailed off and turned a page over and back again. He looked toward the back of the room again. “Barry, what the hell is this stuff currently?” There was light laughter in the room. The same poor kid shuffled through a stack of papers.

  “Uh, sorry, Mr. Termini, Mr. Chairman. Currently mix of Limited Industrial and, uh, some Specialty and some currently un-zoned.”

  “Yeah, okay,” said Joe. “You get that, Madam Secretary?”

  “Yes, I got that.”

  “Okey doke. So, all right. Phil?”

  “Thanks Joe.” Harrow touched the knot of his tie. “So, we request and petition the committee for these re-classifications. I won’t list them, as they are enumerated in the submitted packets, which, I believe, you’ve all had time to review.”

  “With a magnifying glass,” Joe interrupted and laughed.

  Harrow laughed. “Right,” he said. “Diligently. Ahem. So, you can see we propose a modified block-and-artery street plan with a central avenue corridor. There is, um, also a few spots where we wish to either convert to Specialty or retain current Specialty zones for the purposes of semi-public green space. That’s, by the way, the ‘Greenview’ of our project plan title. In any case, we ultimately propose to build a total of 105 townhouse and 103 separate single-family housing units. That will be in three phases over an approximately four-year period commencing with the, well, the commencement of the project. Uh, we will connect with the current city grid at Old Brown’s Hill Road on the southern extension and Forward Avenue above Commercial Street on the northern side. Connect to city sewers, storm drains, utilities, et setra et setra.”

  “Great,” said Termini. “Well, any questions from the board before we approve? That’s to say, vote?”

  “Mr. Chairman!” It was the thin man with glasses.

  “Yes, listen. Public comment comes after.”

  “How,” the gentleman insisted, “Can public comment come after the decision?”

  “He’s right,” Brownlee said. “Mr. Chairman.”

  “Christ,” Termini muttered.

  “Ask them about the leveling!” The man shouted. “The earthworks!”

  “What’s he talking about?” Termini looked at Harrow.

  “Joe?” Zeb Rosen waved his hand weakly. “It’s in the proposal. The, uh, the, uh, the, uh, property, uh, currently, uh, is, uh, consists of a series of small hills and gullies on a ridge-like formation above the, uh, Nine-Mile-Run stream. The plan requires significant leveling.”

  “So what?” Termini turned back to Harrow. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna dam up the damn crick?” He laughed and stuck out his tongue.

  “No, no.” Harrow affected a look of shock. “Abbie, here, is, well, here to explain.”

  “And Abbie’s expertise?” Rosen asked, removing his own glasses and rubbing them absently with his tie.

  “Abbie,” said Harrow, “is one of the foremost environmental architects in America, a pioneer of Earth-friendly construction and design techniques. His resume is—is supposed—to be in the packets as well.”

  “Not in mine,” said Rosen.

  “Not in mine,” said Carl Sefchek, a member of the committee who’d strolled into the room and taken a seat only a minute before.

  Termini shook his head. “Barry!” he yelled.

  “Sorry, Mr. Chairman. That must be an oversight. We’ll get that corrected.”

  “You’ll get it corrected. Well, look. I’ll take Phil on his word. Abbie, you’re the foremost whatever you are. Et setra. Tell me why this is kosher.”

  “Well,” Abbie said, feeling, as he often felt, an itch of prescient dissatisfaction at what he was about to say, remembering, also, his sister’s admonition that he must sound smart but not too smart, expert but not abstracted, forceful but not prideful, competent but not uncomfortably so. “You will actually see that the detailed plans include a very detailed and sophisticated water and runoff remediation plan. It is true that we intend to level much of the property, and some earth will be moved onto the hillside on the left bank, I suppose it would be, of the stream in question. But, I should point out, that this hillside is currently covered with a variety of what we would call invasive species, that is to say, it is mostly weeds, and the streambed itself, though adjacent to maintained woodlands of Frick Park, is, well, frankly pretty blighted. This is not a pristine babbling brook, in other words. If anything, the increased outflow that will result from the natural runoff from our properties will improve the stream’s present condition.”

  “He sounds like a foremost what-have-you to me,” said Joe.

  “Nine Mile Run deserves to be restored, not turned into a drainage ditch!” the little man shouted.

  “It already is a drainage ditch,” Harrow snarled back.

  “Let’s have some order,” Joe said. He looked down his nose. “Phil.”

  “We”—the man indicated his small coterie of citizens, women in loose-fitting clothing and men in jackets that had seen better days; Termini sighed—“demand that this committee table approval of these plans pending a thorough environmental study.”

  “Uh-huh,” Joe said. He glanced at his watch. “That’s really a matter for the planning committee, and, uh, Tonya, you’re the expert. Would you say that that falls within our purview?”

  “Not at five o’clock, Mr. Chairman.”

  “Good, then. Let’s put it to a vote.”

  “But we object!” the man said. “And you are obligated to address—”

  “Gentlemen, ladies.” Abbie stood up and turned toward them. He spread his arms in a manner he felt to be vaguely ecumenical. “My name is Abbie Mayer.”

  “We know who you are,” spat a woman with remarkably flat hair. It was unfair, Abbie thought, that the most well-meaning people were so often so plain, as if the development of conviction had, in some manner, sapped the vital energies that would otherwise have gone into their physical selves, leaving them with the half-formed indeterminacy of children. A child’s awkwardness was fortunately a passage rather than a destination. Abbie considered that he’d been awkward himself.

  Another woman called him a sell-out. He glanced at her. She wasn’t unattractive. Well, maybe that invalidated his hypothesis. He realized his glance was turning into a stare. He fixed his gaze just above them, as he’d learned to do when speaking to a crowd. “If you know me—know who I am, in any event—then you know that I, too, am a man who believes that the ecological impact of our society, our species even, is a matter of great import. But . . . let me give you an example, a metaphor. I’m not sure if any of you are religious men or women. One day, I was sitting in temple on Shabbat. I think of myself as spiritual in the broadest human sense. And I was looking at a beautiful stained glass window of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and you will recall that in that story, too, in Exodus, there was a sort of parable of environmental catastrophe, that is to say, the plagues. And God—Adonai, we call h
im, as Jews—spoke to me. Don’t be nervous. I don’t mean I heard voices. I only mean I imagined a particular image, saw it, envisioned it, you might say. And I happen to believe that God does not speak, but rather, that He puts into our hearts the knowledge of that which He would have said. So, what I saw was a green hill, covered in trees, and a stream flowing down the slope, and a deer, a male deer with antlers. Now, I had been reflecting on this very project at the time, and what else could that have been but a vision of Frick Park and a stream, restored. What I am trying to tell you is, if you know who I am, will you not believe that I believe, fervently, that we might both build this beautiful housing development—no, this neighborhood—amidst the trees, and also see the stream restored down there in our urban forest, our jewel of a park that reminds us what this city was before there was a city here?”

  Abbie thought it had come out rather well. The bespectacled man regarded him curiously for a moment, a look Abbie recognized from a vacation in Italy, when he’d addressed waiters and hotel clerks in a language he was certain was Italian. Then the man leaned around him and addressed Termini directly: “Mr. Chairman, we strenuously object.”

  “Noted for the record,” Termini told him. “We’ll even add the strenuously part. It’ll be very descriptive. Now sit down. Everyone. All right. We don’t need a motion, as this project was already accepted for review. So, aye, for me. Approve.”

  “Aye,” said Rosen.

  “Aye,” said Sefchek.

  “Aye,” said Weston.

  “Aye,” said two more committee members who’d been reading a newspaper.

  “Nay,” said Brownlee.

  “The ayes have it, five to one,” said Termini. “God bless America. Meeting is adjourned.” There was a noise from the back. Termini glanced up. “What?” Barry signaled with his hand and waved a packet of paperwork. “Oh, shit. One more item?” Termini glanced at his watch. Already, the party was rising in the back. He waved them down. “Well, we’ll just table that until our next meeting in”—he looked at his watch for no particular reason—“two weeks’ time.” He rose and walked out before they could protest.