by Shem, Samuel
“I guess it’s just human nature,” she said. “History—American history, anyway—seems to go like that, in thirty-year cycles—the sixties were like the thirties, the eighties like the fifties. Watch—in the nineties, when Cray’s in college, kids will be activists again.” She paused. “Americans want a rest. Reagan’s a rest. And so’s Schooner.”
“Terrific.”
“The other day I came across something in Emerson: ‘The first lesson of history is the good of evil.’ As governments go, this may be as good as it gets.”
“This?”
“Look how hard it is even for us—two people who . . . who love each other—to see eye to eye. Look at the thousands in this town, at the mob at the meeting. Magnify that up to millions, hundreds of millions. It’s the way things are. It’s the way people are.”
“They can’t do better?”
“I don’t know. They haven’t much, historically.” She watched as his face turned sad. She felt a sense of doom.
“Yeah, well,” he went on, somberly, “I feel like we’ve failed.”
“Us?” she blurted out, panicked. “You mean you and—”
“No, no, we humans. Nothing as grand as us. Like the Quakers and their utopia. I keep imagining that we can do better, that people can change, grow. I’ve seen it.”
How, she wondered, with all his cynicism, is he still so innocent? Is it because he’s never been really sick or disabled? Is he so idealistic that everything winds up being a disappointment, his innocence fueling his cynicism? She asked, “But not Schooner?”
“No, not Schooner.” He shook his head for emphasis—and felt energized. “Look, I can’t accept things as they are. It can’t be this shitty. It’s not enough.”
“I never said accept things as they are—”
“You’re the one who’s so cynical about the possibilities.”
“I’m the one walking the picket line,” she said hotly. “Remember?”
“Okay, okay, but why picket, when you have such a dim view of human nature? Why not just give up?”
“Because if you don’t get on a picket line,” she said, her voice fiery, “then the great imbeciles of history that you’re ranting and raving about, like all the people back in there who hate people like you and me and Amy—they’ll tear down your dear old hotel, and if—” She stopped herself. “Forget it. We’re late for Cray.”
“No, no, tell me.”
Miranda glanced at him, then away. At him again. “Because if you don’t bust your butt trying to move the muscles of your leg, it’ll atrophy and you’ll never walk again.”
Silence, but for the wind cutting across the half-open windows of the car.
He reached for her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. I don’t do outbursts well.”
Orville parked in front of the Schooners’, not feeling up to seeing Henry. Miranda went in to fetch Cray. Henry came out, still in the white shirt but the tie now loosened, giving him a homey, paterfamilias look. He stood under the amber porch light and waved heartily. Orville waved back, feebly. Henry ambled down the steps and over to the Chrysler.
An audience with Saint Henry? Have I died and gone to heaven? Orville hit the window’s UP button by mistake, shutting him out, and then hit the DOWN. There he was, face-to-face with the town savior.
“Great to see you there tonight, Orvy.”
“You did a good job with the crowd, Henry.”
“Democracy in action. It’s a great country, isn’t it?”
“Sure is, Henry,” Orville said, feigning sincerity and wondering, Why is it that when I’m talking to him I sound fake?
“Damn,” Schooner said, shaking his head in wonderment. “Maybe, old friend, one of these days you’ll say that and mean it. Don’t matter a damn to me, but, as they say, ‘If you don’t feed the teachers, they’ll eat the students.’”
“Huh?”
“Cray-ballistic!” Henry shouted suddenly, straightening up as Cray ran fast toward the car. “Did you have a beautiful time with Maxie?”
Orville was glad when Cray gave Henry the response he used to give him: none.
“Glad to hear it,” Henry said, chuckling.
“Hey, Orvy!” Nelda Jo was calling him from the porch. She had changed into a silky bathrobe, showing a lot of curve and a little skin. “Why don’t we see more of you? Y’all come see us, ya hear? Say ‘okay.’”
“Okay.” Miranda and Cray got in the car. Henry moved back out of the way, smiling and waving as if they were all embarking for a year on a trip around the world with Bill and Babs and Wolfgang and Kenni.
Cray was in a foul mood. He didn’t respond to their questions about whether he had a good time with Maxie and about what they did and what they ate. When Miranda persisted on the eating part, Cray said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Miranda knew that Cray hadn’t pooped for three days and was worried that he wasn’t eating because he didn’t like pooping. Although she knew she should just leave it alone, she asked, “Did you poop?”
“No! Don’t ask me anymore!”
“Okay, I won’t ask you anymore if you tell me one thing you did with Maxie.”
They were out on Route 9, heading home. “He showed me some pictures, sexy ones, you know, sexy. He said it was ‘fucking.’”
“What?” Miranda cried out. “Who said that?”
“Maxie. He showed me pictures.”
“Where’d he get the pictures?” Miranda asked.
Cray said nothing.
“Come on, Cray, where?”
Cray said more nothing.
“Was it from his dad?” Orville asked, remembering how Henry, as a kid, had shown them all a set of Mexican playing cards with couples fucking.
“Nope. From his brother. From Junior.”
“Does his father know this?” Miranda asked.
“Dunno.”
“Well, he will tomorrow!”
“No! You can’t tell him.”
“Why not?”
“Maxie’ll beat me up.”
“Oh God, did he say that?” Miranda asked.
“Can’t tell you.”
“I’m calling his father as soon as we get home.”
“No!”
“He’ll take care of Maxie, don’t worry. And you’re too young to be seeing things like that and talking like that. Don’t ever say that word again.”
“You do. Orvy does.”
“We’re grown-ups,” she said, with a glance at Orville, “you’re not.”
“Don’t I have any rights?”
“Some.”
“No, I don’t! Damn and fuck!”
“Stop that right now!”
“Fuck.”
“Or you lose TV for a week!”
“I never get my way!” He started to cry.
Back at the house Miranda called Henry, who said he was “Shocked, just shocked!” and he’d take care of it right away. Cray overheard the conversation and, though sullen, seemed okay. They did the normal things with him, Orville reading to him and Miranda lying next to him rubbing his back until he was asleep, and then they went to bed, too.
As they lay together they both sensed a slight shift. They had said things without love and had survived a scare, had sensed themselves a little out of their depths, just that inch or two, which, in novice swimmers, can drown them. The close call had brought them back in to where they could touch bottom, stand, and breathe.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Miranda said, snuggling into his neck.
“Me too. What a day.”
“Maybe, given what Junior did, you’re right about Henry.”
“I’ve had enough Schooner for one day, okay?”
“Me too. But not of you.” She traced a circle on his thigh and broug
ht his hand to her breast.
“Well, sweetness,” he said, feeling that merciful release of being excited and relaxed both, “I guess we’ll find out, eh?”
“Hmmm?” She was letting go of the pain of the day, easing down into him. “Find out what?”
“Whether the humans can do better.”
“How’ll we find that out, Doc?”
“From us.”
At four in the morning, called out into the precarious dark, Orville sighted Selma flying in low off the Hudson from Athens, banking sharply overhead so she was facing due south, floating a little as if getting ready for a final push down the tracks into Columbia. Hair permed, she wore a silky black dress with a scarlet scarf billowing out behind. She was moving fast, riding what looked like an Electrolux.
“Can’t stop to chat!” she said, zooming off. “I’m on my way to something else!”
· 21 ·
Several weeks later—at three in the morning on May Day—Orville sat at the nursing station in emergency, ear-sitting. In iced saline before him was a human ear, female, midfifties, waiting to hear if the surgeons at Albany Medical Center wanted it and its owner shipped up for reattachment. It was yet another medical event in the long story of the family Scomparza that seemed to be at the heart of so much disease, breakage, and death among the Columbians. Fiesole “The Bomber” Scomparza, the mayor’s older brother and barber/bookie to the town, had taken a straight razor and sliced off his wife’s ear “in some heavy love-play, you get me, Doc?” His wife, Lovely, wasn’t talking about how the ear came off, except to say, “If youse can put it back on okay, elsewise I’m goin’ home. I got another, don’t I?” Both were “knee-walking” drunk. By that time, Orville had been awake on and off for two days and kept falling asleep between emergencies.
Since the hearing on the Worth, the medical practice had made a significant shift, from “beyond belief” to “beyond beyond.” Orville couldn’t fathom how Bill managed it. Bill—and now he—was on call for thousands of Columbians, day and night, in solo practice. Sure, he could call in help if he needed it, but he couldn’t count on any standard rotation of days off. Orville kept trying to arrange coverage, without much luck—there were few doctors who had time, and to send anyone to Dr. Edward R. Shapiro was a death sentence. Often the flow would go the other way, a Shapiro disaster landing in Orville’s lap. One of them, two days ago, had been Mrs. Tarr.
Orville got a call from her via the nurse in intensive care in Albany Medical. She was on death’s door and wanted to see him. He drove up at once. Besides their contact around the Worth, he knew little about her life—she was of old Nantucket stock, which had over many generations distilled the quality of WASP-reserve to a nutty essence. He knew that she lived with a spinster friend in the family’s grand old house in Spook Rock, dangerously near Shapiro’s office, and used him as her doctor. In intensive care Orville found her flat in bed, breathless, getting oxygen and IV fluids. She had gone to Shapiro with breathlessness a month ago. He did tests that he said were normal. Unfortunately for the unsuspecting Mrs. Tarr, to renew his medical license Dr. Edward R. Shapiro had taken a ten-day mail-order course in Freudian psychoanalysis. Lying her down on his examining table and analyzing her ruthlessly by rote, Shapiro found out that the breathlessness had begun around the fifth anniversary of her husband’s sudden death when his chest was crushed by a hay baler; drilling deeper, he learned that when she was six she had almost suffocated when a feather pillow had burst in the night. Diagnosis? He told her she had “penis envy and depression” and sent her to Germantown Asylum. There her breathing worsened, and she was sent to Albany. The only abnormalities the Albany doctors found were decreased lung function, a diffuse X-ray with no specific diagnosis, and increased eosinophelia—blood cells indicating an allergic reaction. They tested her for every known allergenic substance; they treated her for infection; they even cut her open to get a morsel of lung for the hungry pathologist. Nothing. They had more or less given up, planning to send her home with a tank of oxygen, to die.
When Orville saw her, he was astonished. Thin and white and blue-lipped from lack of oxygen, she could barely talk. What to do? After months of treating Columbians, he had come to value Bill’s long-held belief that taking a good history is the doctor’s best tool, and that if you could trace the history back through generations, you might not find the disease, but you’d usually find the truth, and the treatment. Orville led her through her history, and that of her family, and while it was a historian’s dream, nothing seemed medically significant. Finally, he gave up. They just sat and chatted—about the Worth, Miranda, Amy, her concerns about her garden, life, death, and if she died what would happen to the poor magician.
“Magician?” he asked.
“Why, yes. The one I took in last fall.” She said that at the Malden Bridge flea market she’d met “a destitute magician with a good heart” who was looking for a room. She felt sorry for him and took him in. He came with pigeons for his act. She let him keep the birds in cages in the basement.
“Where in the basement exactly?” Orville asked.
“Over the washer-dryer.” It turned out that whenever she ran the dryer the exhaust launched an aerosol of pigeon droppings up into the air, which she had been inhaling for months.
Orville rushed to the medical library, looked up “pigeons,” and there it was—“pigeon breeder’s lung disease,” an allergic reaction to inhaled pigeon shit. Treatment? Get rid of the pigeons, and a course of steroids. Prognosis? Excellent.
As the Chrysler flew from Albany back down to Columbia, Orville felt part of one of those rare moments when the spirit of good medicine comes alive, when sustained attention, and listening without an agenda or decision tree, saves a life. How rarely do we really listen, and think! She would live to picket again. He basked in the glow.
It didn’t last. His afternoon out of town had produced a backlog at home. Mrs. Tarr was a bright spot in a long shadow of cruelty and carnage and horrific breakages for the next two days, ending with him sitting, staring numbly at that ear in that ice. In the blur, there were the ordinary cases: drug and alcohol and rage-filled car crashes and clubbings and beatings and attack with “shod shoe” and knives and guns and the crazies and psychopaths and of course the normally walking worried with diagnoses of mental illness that were so common among the Columbians that the adult assessment scores, like the consistently abnormal APGARs at births, had to be recalibrated to a fallen normal. But some cases stuck in his mind.
Sigmund Basch, the town dentist, was a meek, obsessive, and scared man who looked like a mouse and loved golf to death and was known around town for always going up a set of stairs or down counting the steps to make sure he landed on the last one with his right foot. He had just come out of the bank counting and landing when he noticed a pit bull had broken from its leash and, canines bared, was coming at him. The dentist took off, the pit bull gained quickly, the dentist thought he saw a cavity in the traffic and ran into the street and was hit by a ten-ton truck hauling cement from the Universal Atlas. By that time Orville was so tired he was seeing two dentists, but with a little superhuman effort revived Basch and shipped him up to Albany for reconstructive surgery.
The leitmotif through the violence was the sudden surfacing of a suppurative trail of venereal disease that had begun a month ago in a furtive visit from Mayor Scomparza, and that had since wended its way through that family and their playthings, all over the city and county like a bunny-hop at an Italian American wedding. The latest among those appearing at the emergency room were an odd duo—with a “third member” hiding in the waiting room—Greenie Sellers and Blinky the Clown. Greenie was high on coke and spouting what sounded like Norwegian but what a nurse said was Latvian, and Blinky—an alcoholic ageless refugee from Barnum and Bailey who marched in all the parades and entertained at all the school shows and private birthday parties—was low on quaaludes, and they both stay
ed histrionic even when Orville, using the double-gloved technique, milked their putzes for pus. At two in the morning, prescriptions in hand, they left gaily as if leaving a party or a show and Orville, with a morbid curiosity, went to the waiting room to check out the third member of the sexual ménage. Faith Schenckberg, of the sunburnt-offering Schenckbergs of the summer.
At least these provided comic relief, but fleeting relief, as he went back to a heroin-addict mother delivering a premature baby. The newborn was tiny, skin sallow, pupils pinned, sclera jaundiced, twitching all over in withdrawal as every cell in her body cried out for the narcotic. Just as Orville was trying to recall the correct dosage and schedule for managing withdrawal, his old friend Whiz, Hayley’s son, a recovering addict in AA, brought in another Vietnam vet named Timmo Schaffran, who was dying from Agent Orange and, half-crazy from the cancer in his brain, had attacked President Reagan on TV with an ax. Whiz helped Orville figure out the dosages for the withdrawing preemie. Afterward, Orville jumped at the chance to get out of the hospital on a house call. Relishing the privacy of the Chrysler, he drove to a hovel in the armpit of the county where he discovered an old woman who’d been dead for a while and was partially eaten by her trapped dog and whose pony was so neglected that its hooves curled back under its legs and it looked like a rocking horse but couldn’t walk. He turfed the pony to the vet.
Just after the ear and its owner left, in came Seraphina Rock, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of the hospital nurses Orville had known since grade school. Seraphina had been fished out of the Hudson River at dawn by a coal barge near Catskill, ice cold, dead. Her belly was ripped open, she was badly broken up—she’d jumped from the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, a distance he knew from his toll collector days to be 157 feet plus or minus 3 for the tides. A desolate sight. Her intestines had exploded out of her bright-red prom dress, a gold bracelet still sparkled on a horribly contorted arm. Orville called her mom, a widow.