by Shem, Samuel
And when Henry spoke, it was magical. That voice! Where had they heard that voice before? It was a little husky, down-homey, honest, even authentic—a voice neither Orville nor Miranda could ever recall having come from Schooner in person. A leader’s voice, a voice they could follow: The Voice.
“You asshole!” Orville shouted at the tube. “You slimeball!”
“Orvy?” Miranda said, squeezing his arm, motioning to Cray.
“What’s wrong, Orvy?” Cray said, frightened.
An ad for acid indigestion came on. “Nothing, Cray. Sorry.”
“But I like seeing you on TV. Why are you mad?”
“I said, nothing!” Cray’s face collapsed. Orville felt terrible. “Hey, I’m sorry.” Cray turned away, back to the TV.
“Why don’t you and Cray play something?” Miranda suggested.
Cray turned around and looked at her, then at Orville. He seemed to be calculating. “Will you help me make my B-52?”
Orville stifled a groan. Sol’s Toys—because of Selma’s love affair with flight—had specialized in model airplanes. For years, on every birthday he was presented with a new model airplane kit to glue, decal, and paint. Orville grew to loathe making the planes. His finished products never matched the pictures on the boxes. But now, what choice did he have?
They worked on the bomber. But soon Cray was whining, criticizing Orville’s technique. “No, you’re not doing it right! Let me do it myself!”
“Cray,” Miranda said, across the kitchen table. “Be nice, okay?”
They went on a while longer and then Cray, again in a whining tone, said, “No, you don’t know how to put on the decal right. You never do it right!” He burst into tears, threw down the plane, ran upstairs to his room, and slammed the door.
In the heightened silence, Orville and Miranda stared at each other.
“Should I go up there?” he asked.
“Give him a little time.”
“I feel terrible.”
“I know. It’s okay. Just wait.”
They sat together quietly, straining to hear any sounds from upstairs.
There was a squeak, Cray’s door opening. They held their breath. Was he coming down? Nothing. They went upstairs, Orville leading. The stairs creaked.
The door slammed. Harder. Taped to the door was a fresh sign.
PLEZ CAEP OET
“At least he said please,” Miranda said.
“Yeah, but why’s he writing to us in Dutch?”
She laughed, hugged him. They went into her bedroom, undressed, and got into bed.
There was a knock on the front door. Several more knocks.
“Who in the world?” Miranda said, suddenly frightened.
“I’ll get it.” He pulled on his clothes, went downstairs, turned on the outdoor light, and opened the door. Henry Schooner. He looked bad and smelled bad. Sweaty, boozy.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“No. Get out of here!”
“I know you think I’m a sonofabitch but—”
“A lying sonofabitch—”
“—but you heard me call the fucker, and—”
“I don’t think there was anyone on the other end of the line.”
“You don’t?” Henry seemed about to collapse. Orville instinctively reached out and grabbed his arm. Henry seemed to be trying to get into the house. “Can I come in?”
“No!” Orville closed the door firmly and went outside to face him.
A window opened above. “Orvy, who is it?”
“Nobody.”
“Aw shit!” Henry cried out drunkenly. “Izz me, M’randa! Kin I come in?”
“No!” Orville said. “I’ll handle it,” he said to her. “Go back to bed.”
“Okay.” She closed the window and turned off the upstairs light.
Suddenly he was seeing Schooner up close. His doctor’s eyes took in the tiny spider telangectasiae on his nose, a sign of chronic alcohol intake, the weathered skin older than his years, the little fatty deposits on the half-hooded lids that suggested a family history of high cholesterol. There was a strand of spaghetti and a red stain on his rumpled white shirt. His hair was messed up, his mouth looked sloppy, his chin flabby—not only had the TV camera hidden all this, Orville realized, but it was as if in creating something more of Schooner, it had reached in and taken something from him, leaving him, in reality, somehow less.
“I came here to make retributions—no, reparations . . . razza razza roo.”
“You were always a sleazeball, and you’re still a sleazeball, so forget it.”
“Here.” He reached into his shirt pocket for a piece of paper. “I called the fuckin’ station, sent this to them and The Crier, saying it don’t mean you support me.”
Orville took the letter and crumpled it up and threw it away.
“It’s a free press,” Henry went on. “I can’t control the bastards. I’ll make it up to you. We’ll do deals together, play golf. I want to earn your respect.”
“Why? Why in hell do you keep talking about earning my respect?”
“’Cuz it’d be like finding out my big brother loves me after all.”
“Get a life, Henry. Get a damn life.”
“I’m tryin’, ol’ buddy.” His eyes were wet. “I really am.”
“Go home.” Henry didn’t move. As if talking to a dog, Orville repeated, emphatically, “Go. Home.”
“I respect you so much, Orvy. I even dream of you, did you know that?”
“How the hell could I know that?”
“Nice dreams, where you’re my friend.” The Voice, the husky and kindly and sure one that commanded attention, had gone, replaced by just a voice, one like any other.
“Good night.” Orville turned and went in, closing the door and shutting off the light. He listened for the sound of the Grand Marquis starting up and, for what seemed the longest time, heard nothing. Finally, there was the cough of the starter and the pebbly rush of the tires, fading.
Miranda met him at the head of the stairs and took his hand. They went in to check on Cray and then got back into bed.
Orville still felt terrible about how he’d acted with Cray. Miranda tried to reassure him, talking, holding him close, caressing him until his doubt and anger gave way to the electricity of touch.
And Cray? The boy had clicked off like a light switch, with no sense of having fallen asleep until the moment he awoke.
· 16 ·
Honey-b,
How are you? I wonder how I am. What I really wonder is how I will have died. I hope quick. But it doesn’t matter what I hope now because now it’s over. Not now, you know, but now. The dead now.
By now you’re probably still not over your resentment of my will. Of my grounding you for a year and 13 days. Well, Mr. Bigshot Stubborn, too bad. Father Knows Best is a joke. Mother Knows Best is God’s Truth. It’s a human thing for a mother to want her son to have a normal life, especially if he’s gone off track. But not you, no! In none of Sol’s beautiful Kodak family color photos are you smiling. Not one smile. This is saying something—
“Why do I keep reading?” he asked the toaster oven. It didn’t reply. He had gotten the letter that morning and had started it. It was instantly upsetting, though, and he had a hard day ahead, so he’d put it away. Now, at six that night, he felt he could face it.
You have no memory of your childhood. I remember every second. You were the most stubborn kid on the block, silent and sullen. Not like your old friend Henry Schooner. Delightful boy, and now quite the man! He’s back, as you know, and a big success. A Pillar Of The Community. Married a nice girl. Zaftik, but Baptist. This morning—it’s 3 A.M.—I want to chat about one eensy-weensy little piece of your global selfishness that hurt me very deeply.
You and Lily cou
ldn’t have children. Abnormal. SO WHAT? (To have you, I had to have my tubes blown by Bill Starbuck—talk about pain! Good man, bad doctor.) On July 24, 1981, Sol and I hop in the New Yorker—Nice car, isn’t it? And the trunk space? You could die! (And I have!)—and drive down to Jersey to celebrate what you think is your 37th birthday. So hot you could puke. The Garden State stinks to high heaven. Your house is dirty. All this we endure. We go out for a meal. (Lily never cooks.) Chinx. We sing Happy Birthday—very difficult for Sol and me, since it really isn’t. You pay. We appreciate.
In the car you look in the rearview mirror and tell us you two are thinking of adopting a half-Negro girl and have to decide by tomorrow and that you already asked Lily’s parents their opinion.
Your father and I almost blow our Chinx. But we keep cool. I say to myself, WHAT NEXT? Sol tries to be constructive. He says of course being half-Negro she could not be Jewish, and of course when you visit us in Florida she could not stay in our condo so you’d have to rent a motel and so forth. But otherwise, Sol says, it’s wonderful.
You start screaming. Lily pulls her crying trick. Shocked, we quiet right down. Arrive at your less-than-clean home. No one is talking. I’m biding my time. Finally after you’ve had two large scotches before bed, I catch you alone in the hallway and say, “I am deeply deeply hurt that you told Lily’s parents before you told us.” You go bananas. Scream a lot loudly. Given our family history, I worry you will make a suicide gesture. As usual when I invite you to converse, you run. Run right out of the house. I’m so tired my good eye is seeing triple, but do I go to sleep? No, I wait up. I stay there on my mother-vigil, sitting up like I did all those nights in high school when you were running around with Laurice the shiksa, ’til you come home safe and sound. Even after the horrible things you said to me, your mother. Why do I do this? Well, who the hell else will? I stay up.
Because I am a person who is loving and kind and who cares. For your information, a good mother. This may come as news to you. But just ask Penny or Amy or Henry Schooner. Do a little survey.
Love Mom
Orville looked out the kitchen window, into the yard, up into the trees, hoping she’d be there so he could crucify her. But no. The Columbian weatherman had predicted an unseasonably mild and sunny day; a vicious midwinter storm had arrived. An arctic air mass sliding down the Hudson had met low pressure slithering up from the Carolinas and bingo!—heavy snow carried on gusting wind in which even dead mothers wouldn’t fly. He was tempted to throw the letter into the garbage, but since he’d saved all seven previous letters, locked in a safe in Bill’s office, he tucked it into his black bag.
Clack! The wind clapped a branch against the window. Better get out to Miranda’s before I get stuck. Hayley came in, bundled up to leave. She stood beside him, so short that she was at eye level. She’d spent the afternoon cleaning out beer bottles, cigar butts, strewn clothes, and horrific Columbian junk food. Hayley was a reminder of much that was good. They’d gotten close again, she cooking, they sitting and watching TV or listening to Mississippi John Hurt, her favorite Delta bluesman. Her favorite lines: “When my earthly trials are over, cast my body down in the sea. Save all the undertaker’s bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.” And his: “It ain’t no more potatoes, frost have killed the vine. Blues ain’t nothin’ but a good woman on your mind.” He was treating her arthritis successfully with Starbusol. Whiz was going to AA, and her husband Clive’s mechanical and electrical genius applied to the salvation of junk at Geiger’s had recently merited a raise. Hayley was happier.
“Dr. O.,” she said, “will you check out this obiturary I writing for the paper?”
He looked it over. “Terrence Jones Sr., Shiloh Baptist Church member. On February 18, God walked into His Garden and admired everything. With a great interest, God made a decision to give our Terrence a call. So family, may yesterdays memories, each and everyone, help you accept in sympithy that God’s will is done. Terr is going home.”
“Hayley,” he said, “it’s beautiful. I wouldn’t change a word.” She gave him that chipmunk smile he adored. “Tell me. You think Selma’s gone home?”
“Not hardly. She buried here, but never was home here. She said 219 West Tremont Bronx was home once, long gone. I asked her about Heaven. She told me the Jewish way says they ain’t no such thing! No Heaven? So I suppose she very jumpy up there now—”
The front doorbell rang. Hayley went to answer it. He heard her say, “Oh, Lord!”
“Hi, Hayley. Good to see you again.”
Orville went rigid. You never forget the voice. And then she was in the kitchen, his ex-wife, Lily Wolf.
How different she looks—older, thinner. Richer. Richer because of her cute mink pillbox hat and mink-collared charcoal coat flowing elegantly to her shoes—and talk about shoes! Sleek, shiny high heels built up in gleaming zebra layers of hardwood that he knew from Celestina were Italian and cost a billion lire a pair. Over her shoulder was a black leather purse. In one darkly gloved hand she clutched a narrow paper bag scrunched up at the top—clearly booze. Her nails on the other, ungloved hand were scarlet, as were her plump lips. A diamond as big as a dime caught the fading daylight. Not daring to meet her eyes, he stared into the diamond and saw in its facets the falling snowflakes of the storm outside, flashing here and there like angels in flight from a serious dark. She looked good. Kind of gorgeous, really, in a new, sophisticated way. Meeting her dark brown eyes, he braced himself against the red Formica countertop. In the long silence he searched her older face for clues. Strange to feel a stab of love toward this woman who’d convinced him that he was profoundly unloveable, and unloving.
“Hello,” Lily said. Her voice had deepened, relaxed down the chromatic scale. She took off her mink hat. Her black hair was shorter, styled back as if fluffed kindly by a breeze. Her scent read “expensive.” Hayley excused herself and left.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I was driving up to Albany for a deal, and the snow on the Taconic got worse and worse and here I am. The meeting’s not until tomorrow morning.” He wondered if she expected to stay over with him. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll stay in a hotel.”
“That’s okay. You can stay here. Plenty of room.”
“We’ll see. I heard about your mother, you know, through the grapevine.”
“The Penny grapevine?”
“Yes. I would have sent a card, but . . .”
“You didn’t want to trust the mail.”
They laughed. After a year of their student romance in Dublin, Lily had gone back to NYU while Orville stayed in med school. The long-distance relationship didn’t work. They fell out of touch. After a few months, Lily sent a letter that she was getting married in ten days to an older man who worked on “The Street.” Orville was surprised to learn that this meant Wall Street. Heartbroken, on the day of the wedding he sat around O’Dwyer’s getting shitfaced with his fellow med students. Weeping gallantly, Gaelically, into his Guinness. Two weeks later he felt better. He was done with her for good.
But then one night after midnight an emphysematous postman trudged into the med students’ sleeping quarters on the ground floor of the National Maternity Hospital with a letter for him. It was marked “special delivery” but was postmarked the day of the wedding, ten days before. He opened it and read. “Disregard previous letter. Couldn’t go through with it. Still love only you, forever. Forgive me. Love, Lily.” Why had it taken so long to get to him? She forgot to send it Air Mail. It was the world’s first Special Delivery Sea Mail letter. It had floated lazily across the Atlantic and upon arrival in Cork City had been rushed across Ireland on the Cork–Dublin Express and hurried up to him by the night-shift postman yearning for oxygen.
Now she was taking off her expensive coat, revealing other riches. A smartly cut pinstriped suit with two points of a hankie puffing up out of a pocket, and around her neck h
ung a lyric of gold and a few grace notes of diamonds. Flat tummy, wonderful boobs, visible cheekbones, sleek hair, perfume, and a friendly sparkle in her eyes.
“Everything looks so small!” she said. “The town, the house, the kitchen.”
Orville was alarmed to realize that for him this was no longer the case. It all looked normal-sized now, even big. “Not to me. So, what’s the deal?”
“There’s no deal,” she said, tightly, mistaking what he was asking. “I really did get scared driving in the snow and—”
“No, no, I mean the deal in Albany. Your deal?”
“Oh.” She laughed, slightly less tightly. “Oh, well, it’s an LBO, some company that makes plumbing fixtures. A hostile takeover.”
How fitting, he thought. At the time he’d run off to Europe, she’d just graduated from business school and was job hunting. “So, you’re in business?”
“VC.” She picked up his puzzled look. “Venture Capital.”
“Ah. Funny, isn’t it. Not so long ago it meant Viet Cong.”
“I’m with Drexel,” she went on, seeming not to register this, which made him a little sad, “junk bonds. The money’s incredible. Reagan’s amazing, as if he’s giving us permission to print money. They say the market’ll go to a thousand by the end of his second term. It’s wild. Offer a junk bond, you have to beat away the money with a stick!”
All this seemed strange to him. When he’d met her in Dublin, she was majoring in English lit at NYU, focusing on criticism, which, when the marriage died, seemed fitting. She had strengths, but calculations were beyond her. Her checkbook read like a novel.
“I’m surprised,” he said. “You never were all that terrific with numbers.”
“I’m still not.” She smiled. “The guys with the short pencils and the green eyeshades do all that. Business is relationships. Fear and greed. Who you know and who you . . .” She stopped herself. Picking up the brown paper bag, she said, “I brought us a present.”
“Bushmills.”
“What else?” She took out the square bottle, solid amber. “I’ve traveled a lot, you know, but I’ve stayed away from Dublin. Our Dublin.”