by Shem, Samuel
Casually but carefully, Orville studied Cray, his doctor’s eyes searching for the penetrance of his mother’s genes and clues to those of his father. The red hair, surely, was hers, though a lighter, younger red, more orange-red than her strawberry—reminding him of ripe persimmons in the summer sunlight in a market in Lago d’Orta. His eyes, too, were hers, that fresh green, and the lashes were long and dark—sweet. The pale skin betrayed a lack of melanin, and Dr. Orville wanted to rush up and tell him to always—even when it’s not summer—use sunscreen. Freckled cheeks, a pert nose, lips less full than his mother’s—giving him a cute, birdlike look—and a dimpled chin. The rest of his body seemed to come from the other genetic pool, for he was tall for his age, the tallest of all the boys, and his hands and feet were big. Get a basketball into those hands. From watching him on the playing field and watching him eat his orange wedge, Orville sensed a tight energy, a restlessness, shadowed by that hesitation about throwing himself into the game. A great kid.
As the kids slurped at the wedges, Henry kept on coaching. He pushed the ball gently ahead of him, calling out, “Happy feet! Happy feet!” and then, getting up on his toes, did a little dance of the happy feet—with amazing lightness for all that icebox bulk. Then he pushed the ball again. As it rolled, again he cried out, “Happy feet! Happy feet!” He put the boys into groups of two and had them push the ball back and forth to each other and cry out, lightly, “Happy feet! Happy feet!” and do the little tiptoe dance. As they drilled, he came over to Miranda and Orville.
“Howdy, folks. Great to see ya.” For Orville there was the political two-hand clasp and for Miranda a hug. “Orvy, you played soccer, didn’t you?”
Orville noticed what looked like a fresh bruise on Henry’s cheek. “A little. We lost every game, until the Hungarian Revolution. Then Bruno Baloghy arrived. Our strategy from then on was ‘Get it to Bruno!’ We never lost after that.”
“Great country, isn’t it? We take anybody in. A true melting pot. Someday, Miranda, I’ll tell you the deep, dark truth about old Orvy. A real redhot in high school. Kind of a Fish Hawk’s Fish Hawk.” They laughed. “Oh, and by the way, great photo of you guys marching for the Worth. Good to see somebody else doing something for our town. Little Amy’s got herself a purpose and it’s great. ’Course Milt’s not happy, but maybe we can up his dose of Valium, Doc?”
“We’re at the legal limit. One milligram more and he’d turn human.”
Henry busted out laughing. He rolled his head in appreciation. “Now that’s funny. Yeah, Amy’s got herself a purpose, and her dad’s upset. But hey, that’s America, right?”
They said it was right and the whistle blew for the second half and Schooner headed back to coaching.
“It’s ironic,” Orville said to Miranda. “Right up there, up the hill where the path leads from the gym door down into the woods around Kleek’s Pond to Sixth, is where I last saw Henry, after he’d been expelled for scalping tickets to basketball games. He flipped us the finger as he walked away into the woods. Looked just like his son does now. Funny, I keep seeing, in all these adults I used to know, the kids they were—as if it’s a town of children. The town’s shrunk, too. It seems like a child-sized town.”
“I know. That’s how it feels when I go home, too. What year was that?”
“Sixty-two. He was a thug, a bully. Joined the navy, never looked back.”
“People change.”
“Yeah, well, given the first seventeen years, he’s changed too much. As a kid he was a monster—and not only to me, you can ask anybody. Then there’s this gap—what, another twenty years? And now he’s doing everything right. A pillar of the community.”
Squeals came from the soccer field. The boys were clumped on the ground, rolling in the mud, squealing like happy piglets.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Orville said. “I didn’t mean to turn this nice day into—”
“No, no,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “I know what you’re saying. It’s a big question—maybe the question—of history: Are we who we once seemed to be?”
“Exactly. All of us, yeah.”
“Yes.” She squeezed his arm affectionately. “But I don’t have your baggage with Henry. To me, he’s a dad, a coach—a terrific coach. The boys are crazy about him. He seems to be a good dad. Cray and Maxie are friends. They get along great. They’ve had only one fight ever, on the day I met you—Cray hit Maxie on his cast—which was strange, because he’d never hit anybody before, that I know of.”
“Why the cast?”
“Broken arm. Maxie’s accident-prone. Both Schooner boys are—they always seem to have bruises or cuts. His older brother, Junior, is twelve—a rough kid. He seems to be influencing Maxie, and then Maxie influences Cray. It worries me, but all in all—”
Shouts from the mud. Two boys were squared off. The beehive was now two opposing beehives. A boy on Schmerz Drugs—whom Orville recognized as the adopted Korean child of Mouse and Faith Schenckberg Schmerz—shoved Maxie, who tripped over Cray, sending them both down into a muddy pile.
Maxie bounced up, ready to fight. He was about to grab the Korean Schenckberg when there was a strange, high-pitched whistle from the sidelines, like a teakettle. Henry had two fingers in his mouth. Maxie stopped, as if shocked. He turned and walked slowly toward Henry.
The two coaches waded in, making peace. The game ended. The boys gave weak cheers for the other team and sorted themselves out with their parents, almost all of whom, Orville was surprised to realize, he now knew from his practice. He knew their private selves, knew them undressed, physically and emotionally. Knew their secrets. He often heard them in public lie about their health, their happiness, their sexual prowess. As Bill said, “In here we lift up the lid and see the truth.” The Schooners didn’t come to Bill and him. They went to Ed-the-Shyster-Shapiro, way out in Spook Rock.
Cray walked over to them, a muddy warrior, his bowl of red hair streaked with black. He did not look at Orville.
“Cray,” Miranda said, “this is Dr. Rose. Remember I told you he’s coming back to the house for dinner?”
Cray said nothing. He hid behind her. His head pointed straight down. His eyes pointed straighter down.
“Hi, Cray. Call me Orvy.”
Cray said more nothing and ran up the hill out of the grassy bowl to the parking lot. Schooner was collecting the team soccer balls used for the “Happy Feet! Happy Feet!” drill, stuffing them into a big mesh bag, and cleaning up the paper cups and sucked-out orange wedges—much as, Orville thought, he claimed to be cleaning up Our Nation and Our World against Dirty Commies. Henry waved cheerily at them as they walked off.
Orville helped Miranda up the slick grass slope. Soon his New Yorker was following her Country Squire north on Route 9 out of Columbia.
In the car, Miranda asked Cray, “Did you have fun?” From the backseat came a loud nothing. “You still seemed a little afraid, hon, to go into the bunch of kids kicking at the ball.”
“Yeah, I like to wait for it to come out and then kick it.”
“How come?”
A pause. “I don’t want to get bumped and thumped.”
In the past, thinking always that if he’d had a father he’d be more brave, she’d tried to push him to take more risks. But it didn’t work. Not that she knew what did work. But for now, in her gratitude for his honesty, she said, “Uh-huh,” and nothing more.
They took a left off Route 9 onto the rutted dirt road that ran parallel to Kinderhook Creek. Orville’s big Chrysler followed, pitching up and down like a whale doing aerobics, past snow-packed fields guarded by broken stalks of corn to a sudden opening up of the vista where the creek flowed under an iron railway trestle—which cut the foreground like the bottom of a picture frame—and emptied into the partly ice-locked Hudson. In the distance the Catskills climbed easily up into unfathomable air. The sharp light of a lone str
eetlamp ventured partway out on the ice, making it seem rumpled, a white-gray quilt spread over the water to keep the life in it nice and cold until spring.
Miranda’s house was nestled into the crook of the arm where the creek met the river. At the end of the road at the railroad tracks was a circular turnaround, blackened by old cinders. The house tucked itself snugly into the slope of a cornfield and was guarded by three tall pines. It had two stories, the first of massive stone blocks, the second of weathered wood, out of which peeked four dormers in front, and two on the side facing west, toward the river and mountains. The stone was that same buttery-gold limestone Orville had seen in the Cotswolds and the Dolomites and the Columbia Area Library. It caught the low winter sunlight in a way that softened it, making the dwelling itself seem soft, a house of gold. In front of the house was one of those blue historical markers.
STAATS HOUSE
HENDRICK HUDSON LANDED HERE SEPTEMBER 17, 1609
BUILT 1654–1664 BY COLONEL ABRAM STAATS
Cray ran up the grass and in through the unlocked door. Orville helped Miranda up the icy path, grass set intermittently with slate stones. Inside he noted the low-ceilinged small kitchen and living room, reminding him of centuries-old houses in Europe. The place was wonderfully cluttered, cozy. Papers were scattered on the kitchen table. Two zebra finches flitted around a complicated cage with rotating mirrors and a tiny bell on a dangling chain of colorful plastic links. He saw a half-filled cat dish, human dishes undone in the sink, which had a drip. There was none of the Lysol, Windex, and Murphy’s Wood Oil that Penny, with Selma’s maid Hayley’s help, periodically showered down upon Selma’s house. The Lysol never lasted—the house soon relapsed to what Penny called “pigsty.” In his childhood, Hayley had been the warm body of the house, a child-sized black woman with a chipmunk face and enormous black-rimmed glasses, looking at the Family Rose with a certain bemusement. Her son, Whiz, had been a best friend of Orville’s. Lately Orville hadn’t seen much of her, not only because he was busy, but because Whiz was fighting another bad round of the addictions he’d brought back from Vietnam, and her husband Clive was having emotional issues at his job at Geiger’s junkyard. Orville was delighted to see that Miranda’s was a lived-in household. The woman running it was down in the trenches of the essentials: food, clothing, shelter, animals. No vinyl runners. No clean guest towels for clean guests.
“Mom, can I watch TV?”
“Not TV, a video. I got you Jungle Book again.”
Cray hustled into the living room.
“But first, a bath,” she yelled after him. “You’re total mud.”
“Aw, Ma!”
“You heard me. You can run the water and get in. I’ll start dinner and help you when you’re ready. It’ll all be over before you know it.”
“Not before I know it,” he said, but he started stripping and moving upstairs.
Miranda lit the wood-burning stove, and it was soon sending out warmth in that way that reminds you of mortality—heat dropping off fast to that chill just behind your back. She and Orville started in on the Chardonnay he’d brought and got dinner going. Cray called down that he was ready, and she went upstairs to finish him up.
After what Miranda called “the shortest bath in history,” Cray was back down at the TV. He popped in the cassette and sat an inch from the screen and yelled back over his shoulder, “Can I eat in front of the TV?”
“You know the rule.”
“Yeah, but tonight’s special ’cause there’s a guest.”
“A guest who’d like to have you eat with us, right, Dr. Rose?”
“Yeah, I really would,” he said loudly so Cray could hear. “Call me Orvy.”
“But, Mo-om, that’s why I wanna eat in front of the TV!”
Miranda looked at Orville and shrugged. “Okay.”
Cray shouted, “Yes!” and became silent and still, but for his eyes.
At dinner they talked relaxedly about anything but themselves and their probable love, spending much too long on Hendrick Hudson.
“His name isn’t Hendrick but Henry,” she said. “He’s English, not Dutch. He sails not under the flag of England but for the Dutch East India Company. The trip here is a disaster. He’s trying to reach the Spice Islands. First, he sails in the exact wrong direction, due north up the coast of Norway. The ship freezes. The crew mutinies. He turns back and sails in another exactly wrong direction, west across the Atlantic, and finds the mouth of this river, thinking it will lead to something called the Furious Overfall, and then to the Spice Islands. The Overfall, of course, is a total lie, a fantasy made up by a British explorer named Davies.”
“I love the way you do that,” Orville said. “How you always tell the past in the present tense.”
“Oh. Maybe because the present is so tense sometimes. History’s easier for me.”
“For me, too, ever since I met you.”
She blushed. “Colonel Staats, a surgeon and fur trader—” Their eyes met and she laughed. “Colonel fur trader—” Again, they blushed and laughed. “Oh, fuck Colonel Staats!”
“No, no,” Orville said, in mock seriousness. “Colonel Staats is crucial.” She grinned, dimpling her cheeks. “So, does Henry Hudson really land here?”
“How do you mean, ‘really’?”
“I mean, is it true, then, that he lands here?”
“You think that there exists a ‘true’ history?”
“Sure.”
“Oh. Well. When I teach history, in my first lesson I ask the class to write down a sentence describing the weather that day. I write down my own sentence. I read a few of theirs out loud. They’re all accurate descriptions: ‘It was a sunny day,’ or ‘The sun shone all day long.’ Then I take out my description, ‘The day was dark, filled with incessant, driving rain.’ I hold mine up to them and say, ‘This is the one that will survive.’”
“So there’s no true history?”
“The little histories can’t help but be true.”
“Little histories?”
“Of people like us.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Little people like us, yes.”
Looking at him, she got flustered, and brought in of all people Tolstoy. “If you believe Tolstoy, the big history—singular—the one that’s written down in books and called ‘history’ is at heart a few crucial little ones. When someone asked Napoleon how he chose his generals, he said, ‘I choose the lucky ones.’ Apocryphal, but still.”
“Sounds good to me, Miranda.” The use of her name felt intimate. The glow and scent of the wood fire, the glow of the white wine, the first real easing of worry about how each appeared to the other—it was sensual, even sexy. They sat and talked for a long time.
“Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worries and your strife—yeah, man!” interrupted the video from the next room.
Miranda watched Orville turn to look. He clearly was not used to having a child around, to attending to two or three or ten things all at once.
Orville was of two minds. He wanted to make contact with Cray but at the same time wanted Cray to evaporate for a while so he could take Miranda in his arms.
“I’d like to try again with Cray,” he said.
“Fine.” She got up, feeling a little tipsy from the wine. “Let’s make a little sally into Cray Country.”
Cray was still frozen by the set, a few inches from the screen. A forkful of pasta was in his hand, a plateful on his lap. His straight red hair shone.
Orville made several attempts to engage Cray, starting with, “Hi, Cray.”
Nothing. The boy wouldn’t even look at him.
Miranda watched this, saw in Orville the clumsy overtrying of a man who never had children. She felt both sorry for him and more loving toward him for that lack. She touched his arm and said, “It’s oka
y. Let it go.”
But Orville persisted. He himself loved Disney’s Jungle Book, having watched it years ago when he’d babysat Amy. His favorite animals were the elephants. At one point the elephant leader, Colonel Hahti, does something stupid with his own son, the littlest and last elephant in line, and the colonel’s wife, Winifred, confronts him. Orville knew the line by heart, and recited Winifred’s line along with her, mimicking exactly her voice, that of a stern old Victorian matron, “Oh shut up, you pompous old windbag!”
“Shhh!” Cray hissed. “Now you made me miss it!” He hit Stop, Rewind, Play.
Miranda held out her hand to Orville and led him away, out of the reach of the TV.
“Bye, Cray,” Orville said airily.
Nothing.
“Well, that was a big success,” Orville said.
“Join the crowd. It’s almost nine thirty. He and I are gearing up for what I’ve labeled ‘The Nightly War of the Bedtime.’” They laughed. “He’s a night owl. He’d stay up until midnight if I let him. Lately it’s a real struggle to put him down.”
“I’d like to stay, but with Bill gone, I’ve still got to make rounds at the hospital.”
“Some other time.”
“I don’t mean—”
“I do.”
He understood and took her hand. “Is it that he doesn’t like me? Or is afraid of me? Or just doesn’t care?”
“I would guess—and it’s just a guess, mind you—that he’s afraid to care, ’cause he might just care too much.”
Orville sighed, relieved. “Yeah, like us all.” He squeezed her hand, feeling sad, sad to leave her, the boy, this cluttered coziness.
Saying good-bye on the doorstep, out of sight of Cray, they hugged. At first it was a we’re-adrift-together-in-a-life-raft kind of hug, but then the physical space turned more friendly and they really hugged, he feeling her breasts against his sweater, she feeling his fingers on her back, then tracing light whorls on the nape of her neck, like phantom hair. Standing together out on the cold shelf of winter, just behind the boy’s back, it felt illicit, sexy.