by Shem, Samuel
Selma Ariel Fleisher Rose, a large, aproned shape looming over the stove, didn’t respond.
He persisted, dragging a chair over, climbing up, and telling her again, slowly and loudly, as if trying to get through to a foreigner.
“Something else! Mom, I’m part of something else!”
Selma, startled to find her little boy at eye level, stared at him. He saw a cloud pass across her gaze. She sighed. “Orville-doll, there’s nothing else but this. Go get dressed for the Catskill Game Farm.”
The boy felt a rough, twisting pain in his chest. He clenched down on it, trying to make it go away. He fought back tears.
“What’s wrong, honey-bunny?”
Dread was rising, the pain was going. He felt himself numbing up, like his mouth did when he was at Basch the dentist’s. He broke eye contact. Feeling her fearful concern, he said, “Nothing.” He turned and ran back out the door.
Now, standing on the tracks, he realized how that moment had been one end of the thread that had unspooled all these years in a life spent running, a life restless with questions. And now she’s dead? he asked himself. What the hell does that mean?
Realizing that now there would be a breakage—the train arriving, Penny and Amy meeting it and not finding him on it—he hurried on. As he passed the rotting two-story brick lighthouse and rounded Mount Pecora, the vista north opened up. There across the rust and purple wash of wildflowers and golden cattails that furred the skin of the marsh, starting at Parade Hill—a high cliff over the river—and then riding down and up a ridge eastward to the heights of Cemetery Hill, was his hometown, Columbia.
A shiver swept over him. How beautiful, the muted pallet of the summer marshland and the shifting reflections from the town. How tiny Columbia looked, no more than a few glitters of the lowering sun off the church spires and metal roofs and the green copper dome of the Courthouse and the glass windows of the abandoned factories and the nine-story housing project and, nicely adjacent to the cemetery, Kinderhook Memorial Hospital. So small, so innocent and needy, as if you could cup it in the palm of your hand and hold it there happily, a live thing, say a kitten, it and you safe there for the rest of your life. With a stab of excitement, he walked toward it.
But then the day attacked. Not having been back in Columbia for over two years, Orville had misjudged the distance badly, imagining things to be closer than they actually were, as if he were seeing his past in a passenger-side rearview mirror. He had miles yet to go. The sun, sinking behind the soggy clouds snagged on the peaks of the Catskills, was soon a reddish ulceration. The marsh turned to swamp, and mosquitoes began to work his flesh, even through his shirt. Tumorous red lumps appeared and itched wildly. To smoke them off, Orville lit a cheap, stumpy Italian cigar, a Parodi, which had the virtue of not staying lit, so it lasted forever. He put on Celestina’s going-away gift to him, an Italian women’s swim team sweatshirt in the red, white, and green of Italy that to him always signified the tomato, cheese, and basil of a pizza. He flipped the hood over his head and drew the string tight, leaving just an opening for his eyes. Soon he was roasting. His pants clung wetly to his thighs, rubbing together as he walked. Sweat oozed down from the hollow of his throat onto his chest and belly and pooled in his crotch. It was now past midnight in Italy. His adrenals were depleted for the day, and waves of fatigue swept over him.
Cursing, panting, hooded, puffing smoke like a steam locomotive, Orville at last rounded a turn and saw the old train station. A rusted crane rose close by the tracks, a forgotten sentry, its hook dangling down. The station was in shambles, paint peeling, brick crumbling. A sign read
OLU B A
Some pestilential Caribbean outpost, perhaps? In the murky dusk, the shapes seemed spectral. Orville looked around, hoping someone had stayed to meet him.
No. No one was there to meet him.
In the waiting room he found a water fountain. Thirsty, he stared at it, at first hopefully, then superstitiously, and then, with each slow, stalking step he took toward it, accusingly. He pulled the handle. Nothing.
He walked out of the station and up the hill to the main street, Washington. How small everything seems, he thought, as if it’s a toy town for a child. A banner spanning the mouth of the town featured a spouting grinning whale and the message
WELCOME TO COLUMBIA
A WHALE OF A TOWN
SPOUT
(Society to Preserve Our Unbelievable Town)
As he walked up the dead-straight backbone of the town, he saw, on brand-new signs announcing each cross street, the same grinning, spouting whale. Why whales? He vaguely recalled being taught in school that Columbia had been a whaling port, with whales caught in the Hudson River. But wait a second. Whales live in seawater. The Hudson is freshwater. Whales in a freshwater river?
In the haze of this last leg of his journey up Washington, one sight stopped him.
Just above Third Street, across from the neglected Painted Lady Lounge, was the General Worth Hotel. Once grand, it was now falling down. It was three stories tall, nine windows wide, made of brick. Now all the windows were boarded up or broken, graffiti and bullet holes were prominent, and the classic portico held up by four Doric columns was sagging badly to the right. An old sign read GENERAL WO HOT . Orville had a vision of his mother, wearing a dazzling cobalt-blue satin gown, as President of the Hospital Auxiliary at the annual Spring Fling benefit, flanked by her beloved candy stripers as she made her grand entrance down the majestic staircase to the ballroom of the Worth.
In front of the hotel was a three-person picket line, each person carrying a sign that said “Worth Saving.” They were circling a yellow plastic pail for donations. One of the picketers was an old, white-haired woman walking with a cane. Another was a boy with dazzlingly bright red hair, straight red hair that whirled like water as he hopped and twirled. The third was a woman about his own age with slightly darker straight red hair. She wore a work shirt and jeans and a purple scarf and she was limping.
As a doctor, Orville could not help but read bodies, as farmers read land and weather, or sailors weather and seas. Dimly, through his exhaustion, he took it all in at a glance—the muscular upper torso, the built-up shoe, the asymmetric pelvic tilt—all of which told a story of a chronic deformity, maybe a childhood injury or illness. Despite the heat he shivered. Why, he wondered, as he had wondered more and more lately, do I have such trouble now with the deformed?
Through the gauzy dusk the three circled silently.
He walked on. In the town of his childhood, the walk all the way from lower Washington up to Fourth and then a long stretch up Harry Howard past the Fireman’s Home had been a great distance. Now, in the toy town of his less expansive vision, it was not far at all. Soon he was on the outskirts, in a development of ranch houses, and at the door of his sister Penny’s ranch.
Wet, bruised, and bleeding, smelling like creosote and bitten all over by ferocious insects, several weeks late for his mother’s funeral and dressed like a pizza, on August 14, 1983, Dr. Orville Rose arrived home in Columbia.
· 3 ·
“Mom did what?” Orville shouted.
“Calm down,” said his sister, Amelia “Penny” Sarah Rose Plotkin.
“Unbelievable! Barbarian! Selma the Visigoth! I’m outta here! I’m catching the next train back to Italy.”
“You’ll be rich. You’re broke, you’re drowning in debt—”
“I’d rather be dead.” Orville struggled to free himself from the soft sofa. “Good-bye and good luck.”
“Very rich,” said Milt, Penny’s husband. “In a year and thirteen days.”
The three of them had settled deeply into the furniture of Penny and Milt’s sunken living room, a sanctuary on a southwestern theme done all in “biscuit” and “Navajo White,” a beige kiva. Plastic vinyl runners protected the white carpet in the high-traffic zones. Penny, he realized, ha
d become almost as much of a neat freak as their mother. At the end of his marriage to Lily, Orville had lived in such a house in New Jersey, complete with—the phrase had become a derisive mantra for him—“clean guest towels for clean guests.”
Orville, Penny, and Milt talked about the sad event of Selma’s death, comforting themselves that the end was merciful: a massive heart attack while cleaning the kitchen floor in her house on Courthouse Square. It brought back their father, Sol’s, death a decade ago, he, too, felled by a heart attack, again mercifully, after a massive swing in a tight match on the sixteenth hole of the Catskill Country Club, a tricky par three over a brook and up a tough hill to an undulating green. Brother and sister agreed that in the time since his death, their father had mellowed, and both children now had mostly happy memories of him. Sol, the “Toy Store King,” seemed more present in death than he had ever been in life.
“How rich?” Orville now asked, having climbed up out of the arroyo of the living room to the vinyl runner on the ridge leading toward the door.
“Adding all assets,” Milt said, “almost a cool mil.”
“Okay, I’ll stay.” They stared at him. “A joke. Where the hell did she get that kind of money?”
“It helps to be the only toy store in town for forty years,” Penny said. “Dad sold a lot of toy airplanes.”
“And the Jolly Jews made a killing,” Milt said, happily. The Jolly Jews had been Sol’s investment and poker club. “Y’know how they always say that if you’d of only put ten grand into conservative stocks and waited forty years you’d make a bundle? They did, and they did. And the last coupla years, with Reagan, you’d have to be a chimpanzee to not get rich. It’s like a miracle around here, how the New Yorkers have discovered Columbia. They’ll snap at anything! Especially the artsy-fartsy crowd, setting up antique stores in the danger zones down below Fourth. They come up here to get away from the gunfire and drugs in New York City; we sell ’em a piece of crappy storefront where they can live upstairs and what do they find? Gunfire and drugs!” Milt laughed so hard he seemed to cramp up. “We get a lot of gays. Pretty soon the three meccas for the gays will be ’Frisco, Fire Island, and Columbia.”
Orville stared at his brother-in-law. The tall body had gotten pudgy now, and the pink Ralph Lauren shirt stretched the polo player over significant male breasts. Milt had always played tennis, and the crisp white shorts were now cutting into legs more flabby than Orville recalled. Milt had been discovered by Selma through the synagogue sisterhood Hadassah. Penny, a senior at Columbia High, was in love with Polonia Scomparza, a nice boy but goyim. Milt saved the day. He came from Albany, an hour upriver, and was hell-bent on becoming a certified public accountant like his dad. At first, Milt had always seemed braced for pain, yet chatty. Now, around Penny, he seemed pain free but as silent as Sol had been around Selma.
In the past few years Milt had been less an accountant and more, in his words, “a man in development.” He was making money, and money was making him. Bald, with a half-smile resting on his moon-face that widened to a laugh, making his eyes happy slits and his big head roll this way and that in wonderment at life’s riches, Milt now seemed happy. Finally, Orville thought, the wolf of failure has been driven from his door. Here before me is a success. Dealing all his life with a sense of his own failure, Orville now looked at Milt with an electric fascination, asking himself, How the fuck has he done it? What the hell has happened to the concept of America as a meritocracy?
The terms of Selma’s will had a certain elegance. Half went to Penny. The other half, and the family house and car, went to Orville.
There was a catch.
Orville got the money, the house, and the car only if he lived in the house continuously for one year and thirteen days, starting on the day he arrived home. “Why the extra thirteen days?” he asked Penny and Milt. No one knew. The house was a nineteenth-century Victorian sitting on Courthouse Square in the town center. The car was an elephantine ’81 Chrysler New Yorker—“The biggest Chrysler makes,” Milt said. “Your trunk space is amazing.”
Staring down at his sister and brother-in-law from the vinyl runner, Orville said, “Live here? Live here?”
“We do.”
“I’d die in a month. It’s blackmail. How could she do this to me?”
“I believe, Orville Abraham,” Penny said, “she did it out of love.”
“Did you know about this?”
“No. It was news to me too.”
“And if I leave?”
“You get nothing.”
“Who gets my almost-mil?”
Penny looked to Milt. Milt looked to Penny.
“All of it? The whole other almost-mil? You get my mil?”
“Nowadays,” Milt said, “a mil doesn’t go all that far.”
“Let me be clear,” Penny said. “We’d rather have you here than have your money. Right, Milt?”
“Oh, sure,” Milt said. “Sure, sure. You’re family. Sure.”
“And if I go, what happens to the house?”
“It sits there empty for a year and thirteen days,” Penny said. “It can’t be sold or rented. Then Milt and I get it and we can sell it.”
“And the car, too,” Milt said. “The New Yorker.”
“The house just sits there empty for a year?”
“Hayley keeps cleaning it and Buzzy keeps fixing it.”
“No dice. I’ll stay out the week, to see you guys and Amy.”
“No, you won’t,” Penny said.
“What do you mean I won’t?”
“Amy’s away at drama camp. Her first overnight camp and it’s killing me!” Penny took out a hankie, started to cry. “I will not let you see her unless you’re staying.”
“She’s my niece! She’s my special—“
“She’s my daughter, and I will not subject her to your comings and goings at this time of our grief. You know how close she was to Mom. I mean, she’s taking it well—sometimes I think she’s the most mature one in the whole family—but when we couldn’t even find you, she got that look in her eye and said, ‘It’s like Orvy’s dead, too.’ She’s doing okay at camp, but it just about killed me between not having Mom anymore and your not answering my telegram and calls and sending her off. . . .” Penny blew her nose, an astounding hroonnnk! She looked up at Orville and said, “I figured you’d say no to this. But this time, for once, I’m being smart. I’m cutting my losses.”
“Wait. After we spoke last night—you didn’t even tell Amy that you’d found me?”
“If you had a child, you would understand.”
Orville felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. He rocked back on his heels, seeing in his sister the same genius for hurt their mother had. Penny was staring at him, chin up in self-righteousness. Orville’s gaze fixed on her neck, on the prominent wrinkles encircling it; the swan’s neck that when she was a young woman had been her pride and joy, to be shown off with a collection of necklaces that outstripped even Selma’s; a neck that, always uncovered down past Tuesday, helped deflect attention from her slightly too long, too narrow face, her thin lips, her brown eyes set slightly too close to the nose. Her neck was now partly hidden by a high-ruffled black Victorian blouse. The skin never lies. Her connective tissue was going. He read in this woman of forty-four the skin of a sixty-year-old. She’s too thin now, eaten with anxiety, and as nervous as a small bird. His eyes traveled back across her body and medical history to her overcheery girlhood in this overdepressing backwater, where culture was a yearly piano recital at the junior high by someone from out of town who was an unknown about to become a has-been, and where the nearest nice Jewish boy was an hour upriver in Albany.
And so Orville shifted, hearing in her voice, however vicious, the voice of his mostly helpful big sister, and his rage eased and he smiled.
Penny, too, awakened by her anger, suddenly saw her
little brother more fully, these two years on. She thought he looked younger, more handsome, healthier, slimmer, with a dynamite tan. She noted that he was no longer wearing glasses.
“Contacts?” she asked, smiling. He nodded. “You look great, Orvy. Mom would’ve been proud—I mean, of your looks.”
“Partly proud. Let us not forget The Incident of the Other Necktie.”
Penny laughed. One Chanukah several years ago, Selma had given Orville two neckties. He went upstairs and came back down wearing one. She took a look, sighed, and said, “You didn’t like the other necktie?”
“Partly proud maybe,” Penny said. “So listen, kid, why not stay?”
“What the hell would I do for a year? Watch TV? Play golf?”
“Golf,” Milt said sagely, “is good.”
This comment led up a narrowing wash to dead silence. Orville noticed that Penny was grinning, and he knew it wasn’t because of what Milt had said.
“What?” he asked. “C’mon, c’mon.”
“Oh, nothing. I just remembered something. Bill asked after you.”
And then Orville got it. Bill Starbuck, the aging town doctor, had been the one who’d led him into medicine.
“Oh, no,” Orville said, backing away, his hands warding her off as if she were a ghost or were pointing a gun—or were a ghost with a gun. “You wouldn’t, you didn’t!”
“You’d be great, Orvy.”