by Shem, Samuel
“But what if I can’t face it,” he said, “and the healing essenza doesn’t happen?”
“I will love you no matter what.”
He was startled to find that for the first time in weeks he felt calm. The sunlight streaming in through his turret window seemed both still and moving—moving faster than any other thing, moving so fast it seemed static. Light is matter, matter is energy. It was, again, a touch of her maybe magic. He thought back to her predicting the two bad things that had happened the last day they’d been together on Lake Orta and he’d gotten the telegram of his mother’s death. He asked, “Where are you?”
“Roma. Like always. Your photo by my bed. I am now a banker.”
“A banker!”
“Chase Manhattan, Rome office. I teach courses part-time—Yoga For Bankers. The very payment of the rent. So much has happened. I missed you so!”
“And I you,” he said cautiously, trying it out, surprised at how much he meant it.
“When are you coming?” she asked.
“Who said I was coming?”
“You did. In one year and thirteen days.”
“Yeah, but a lot has happened. A lot of water under the bridge. And anyway I can’t leave for four weeks. I get the money on August 27th.”
“Eccolo!”
“Eccolo?”
“‘There it is.’”
“Wait.”
“I am waiting with my very heart in my throat. Breathing in, breathing out. Speak.”
He did not. He was thinking of her and the money.
“Pronto, pronto. I am listening,” she said, “but you are not speaking.”
“You assume that after all this, I’ll just forget how you treated me and come to you as if nothing has happened?”
“No, no, as if everything has happened and we have learned. We are more sensible now, both of us. Ready to really love each other, sensibly, walking down the street arm in the very arm. We have our whole future together.”
“I thought you said there is only the present.”
“Not for lovers like us.”
“I’ve got to think about this.”
“Think?” She sighed. “Each day we think maybe 60,000 thoughts. Maybe 59,995 are about what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. Memory or imagination. We fear being in the now. Now, caro, come!”
Orville was silent.
“You have someone else?” she asked.
“I had, but no, not now.”
“And I do not either. Come. I expect you on the 27th. We will holiday again on Lago d’Orta.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“No, but I can feel your heart saying sì, sì. Wait, I am thinking.”
Orville thought to say, But what did you just say about thinking?
“Sì,” she went on, “I am getting it. We must not talk again until we see each other face-to-face and quickly then toe-to-toe. I will not call you again. Send a telegram with the details.”
“But you have to . . . we have to work this out!”
“Too much thinking, caro, thinking and talking. No more phone calls.”
“I’ll call you.”
“I am screening the calls and not answering you though my heart is breaking at your very voice. No more talk. Telegram me your flight number. Until the 27th in Roma!”
“The plane won’t get into Da Vinci until the morning of the 28th.”
“Until then, mio grandioso amore. I will never leave you again. Ciao!”
“Wait!”
Click.
Weird, Orville thought, several times throughout the day as he prodded and patched and cut and sewed and listened to and berated and held back his contempt for and tried to reach out to the sick and wounded Columbians or at least act human toward them. Deliciously weird. As abnormal as the Buddha, as Jesus. She did seem different. More sensible, yes. Wanting me. Italy. How can I refuse her? How can I trust her? But Italy! I was happy with her in Italy! Maybe it was good that she never came here. Hard to imagine her and me happy, here.
Like booze and cigarettes and Fritos and golf, this contact with Celestina Polo eased his pain for a while. Now he had an option. He still felt like a total failure as a son, a lover, a stand-in father, an uncle, a brother, a brother-in-law, a bird keeper, a friend, and a Columbian, but now these failures were playing out on a backdrop of the affliction of possibility, once again in Europe.
You know something, Mom, he thought, you’re right. I’m wrong and sick and abnormal. So abnormal I can’t even make it in Columbia, not to mention America. The hell with it. I’m history. The only thing I’m fit for in this world is to love a strange maybe enlightened Italian Boddhisattva who at least can intertwine her toes with prehensile diligence, and who, at best, is made up wholly of non-Columbian elements.
Penny was the only person except Miranda to know the truth about July 24th not being Orville’s real birthday. She had told no one. She had suggested that it would be “cleaner,” especially with his leaving so soon, to just go ahead and celebrate the day that everyone thought his birthday was.
She organized a dinner party for that night, with Milt and Amy and Henry and Nelda Jo. Amy had come in from her all-girls’ overnight camp out at Copake Lake for his birthday. To him, she seemed down. She’d taken Miranda and Cray’s leaving hard, and was at loose ends at camp, not wanting to turn into a “girly-girl” and “act silly for boys.” Penny and Milt again had sent her to him for advice, which he, like Starbuck, hadn’t given, but rather had taken her on a few house calls whenever she could get away. She was losing altitude. Something else was on her mind. He needed to talk with her alone.
The birthday dinner was at an Italian place, Rosie Ahern’s Restaurant and Taxidermy. A fixture in town ever since Orville could recall, it was now owned by his childhood friend Marco Tarantelli. Marco also ran the Sports Apparel Shop next door. The shop had had the same pair of shorts, shirt, sneakers, and tennis racket in the window for about fifteen years. Not everyone knew what the shop sold, but everyone knew that the one thing it did not sell was sports apparel. Rumors of slot machines, prostitutes, drugs, and loan sharking were rife.
Since the New Yorkers had come, the restaurant—with its camp taxidermy—had become one of the “in” places to see and be seen. Here the antiquers could safely mix with the real Columbians. Ahern’s signature take-out pizza had been written up in an antique journal not so much for its content as for its delivery: on the back of a Vespa, strapped with bungee cords over the motor so that it arrived piping hot even on the coldest nights. With a distinct bouquet of benzina.
At six that night the birthday party sat at the primo table in the front window, sometimes staring up at the stuffed fox and moose and mink with their frightened eyes, sometimes staring at the New Yorkers, who were loud and current and having a frantic, hilarious time, and sometimes staring out across the intersection of Fourth and Washington at the old jail building that was now home to The Columbia Crier.
The narcotic of hope and denial from his conversation with Celestina had worn off. He was again down in the dumps. Orville had spent the day before with a young doctor who had answered an ad for the sale of Bill’s practice, to take effect when Orville left town. This was the fifth doctor who’d come through in the last two months looking to settle in Columbia. His name was Patrick O’Lima and he was from Dublin. Trinity, not UCD. When he’d opened the IN door, Orville was surprised to find a man with ebony skin. It turned out that O’Lima had been born Olima, a Nigerian who adopted the apostrophe to make it in Ireland. O’Lima spent the day with Orville, looked around Columbia, and, saying “Are you serious?” strolled on out the OUT.
They were finishing their birthday cake, and Schooner was ending his short but heartfelt tribute to Selma Rose. “My only wish is that she could have been here, sitting right here under the mink
like she did a lot, to see this great moment for her favorite son.” Orville heard this as not just saccharine bullshit but as a put-down, for he had come to see that Schooner, not he, was in a lot of ways his mother’s favorite son.
But there was something about the way Henry spoke—the Voice again—that made it sound not only sincere but profound. By the time he finished, there was an expectant hush in Ahern’s. The tableful of antiquers were listening in rapt attention, as were the dazed Columbian barflies. When Henry stopped and raised his glass for a toast, so did they all.
Milt chimed in, breaking the hush. “It’s been great to have you here—sort of great, mostly great—maybe you’ll take one whiff of Europe and come back to smell the roses of Columbia. You’re always welcome because we love you. And love what you’ve brought to this town—medicine, a great personality, and hey, even though it’s Penny and my and Amy’s loss, we admire you for sticking it out the year and thirteen days to get the money. Shows guts, shows fortitude, shows fiscal responsibility. To my favorite brother-in-law, a helluva guy, L’chaiyim!” They raised their glasses again and drank.
During dinner Orville had felt out of it, walking along the edges of the current of conversation. First it had been an inane mix of talk of new machines. Henry had bought a new Harley-Davidson. Milt had come back from Seattle with a new computer so compact that it fit into a small suitcase and ran on something called MS-DOS, which he claimed was going to make a mint. Penny had bought a new golf cart, Nelda Jo a new StairMaster. They then talked about movies and TV shows. And then the Schooner campaign and then their children, notably Maxie, who was flowering at his Soccer and Firearms Campout at the Federation of Polish Sportsmen.
He drank another beer, feeling the buzz. He found himself staring out the front window of Ahern’s at the slight dip in Washington as it crossed Fourth, and he was hit by that hard fist of grief. Miranda Braak. She had told him that when the town was created, there had been a deep gully at Fourth Street and that the Quakers, in marching their utopia from the port at Parade Hill up to Cemetery Hill, had built a massive stone bridge to cross the gully. It had been a marvelous construction, a long stone arch in the Roman style, and had become something of a wonder of the time. Later they’d buried the stone bridge under tons of fill.
Eerie, he thought now, to realize that a bridge lies there, buried. Looking at it now, the intersection seemed less solid for its secret. Settling had revealed something else there, a significant depression. If the fill shifts, will the bridge hold? Orville stared at the dip as if it were a patch of skin over a torso, secreting away the bones of a corpse below. Miranda understood history with a wordless, nameless sense of the town through time, much like a virtuoso in music or math or chess senses their art. Through her, the town for a time made sense. Even the century made sense, through her.
I miss them so much! Where are they?
But he was being roughly hoisted up out of his seat by Nelda Jo and Henry and ushered on out the door. The party was over.
It was still early in the summer evening. The light had that glossy luminescence of late July and reminded him of being in the red rowboat out on the lake with Celestina, looking back through the haze to the Sacre Monte with its twenty chapels and the pilgrims moving, stopping to pray, moving again, as they made their way up.
He was off duty and had nothing to do. Facing an evening alone in the house, he felt a blast of desolation. “Henry, can I ask you a favor?”
It was a rare moment—Henry seemed caught off guard. Orville had never done this before. Before, it was always Henry asking. But Henry’s response was quick and tight, “Thought you’d never ask, old buddy. Anything.”
“Could I take your Harley out for a birthday ride with Amy?”
“Amy on a motorcycle?” Penny said. “Over my dead body.” What she was really saying, Orville knew, was that motorcycles were for the goyim.
“Can I, Uncle O.?”
“Up to Henry.”
“Ever been on one, Doc?” Henry asked, revealing a certain and unusual caution.
“Owned a BMW during my year in Holland.”
“Nice bikes, those. Here’s the key, and here’s the helmet.”
“Only one?” Penny asked. “It’s illegal.” Amy was putting on the helmet.
“Maybe, Pen, but hey—if I go down, you get the money, the house, and the Chrysler.” He pecked Penny on the cheek, shook hands with Milt, and was about to clasp hands with Henry but was engulfed in Henry’s warm hug. Nelda Jo hugged him too, the aerobic push of her breasts against his chest firing up his engines as always.
“When will you be back?” Penny asked.
“September.” Orville got on the gleaming bike, showing Amy how to put her arms around his waist and hold tight. Her hands felt great there.
“What a wit, eh?” Henry said, shaking his head as if in amazement.
“Let’s make sure to get together again sometime soon,” Milt said.
“I can’t, Milt,” Orville replied. “I’m busy that day.”
“What?”
He started the bike, revved it. “Ciao!”
“Hey, old sport,” Henry called, over the roar. “We’re goin’ to a prayer vigil at the AME Zion Church tonight, for that poor kid shot last night, then we’re at a campaign appearance out at Spook Rock, so just leave the key on the kitchen table. Door’s open.”
“Deal.”
They roared off, Amy hanging on tight and screeching with delight.
They idled down Washington to Third and turned left and hit the last light and then accelerated down the hill into the Great South Swamp, the pink foam noodles of Styrocusp Corp. whirling in their wake like confetti. Riding the sticky asphalt through the high cattails and the infestation of imported purple loosestrife, feeling the flecks of bugs on his unhelmeted face, Orville recalled getting off the broken-down train and walking the tracks through the swamp up into town. Hard upon this memory was Miranda’s showing Amy and Cray and him the Henry Ary painting of the pre-railroad South Swamp, when it was still a marvelous bay, a deepwater port filled with so many whaling ships that you could walk deck to deck all the way across the bay from Mount Pecora into Columbia.
They went left at the entrance to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and down 9-G before turning left into the curly road rising up a hill through the woods toward Olana. Orville stopped the bike and parked in the lot. A tour bus was disgorging a procession of blue-haired ladies from Wappingers Falls for the last tour of the house that day.
Amy took off her helmet. Flushed, she yelled, “Fantastic! What is this?”
“Olana. Home of Frederick Church.”
“Who?”
“A truly great Columbian. Come on.”
A great Persian-tiled turret rose before them. The Moorish doorway and the three stories of echoing windows and flirtatious balconies were a shock of color and shape in the lowering sun. This, he thought, was my first sight from the train. Ages ago.
They signed the guest book and joined the tour. The guide quoted an entry from Church’s diary: “I think it better to reside on a mountain which overlooks the world than to be a mere creeping thing trying to see it as a mass of details. From an eminence you take in the beauties only. About thirty miles south of Albany is the center of the world—and I own it.”
The house—in Arabic, “Olana, Our Place on High”—was Church’s living art, done with the care of his landscapes, which had made him the most famous American artist of the late nineteenth century. Olana was zany, a crazy mix of Italianate and Persian, made of polychrome stonework from local quarries, filled with fanciful Moorish arches framing each landscape like one of his landscapes, symmetrical mirrored chambers, purples leading to golds and golds to reds, and furnished with remarkable objects from all over the world—Arabic brass pots and English suits of armor and Chinese life-sized Ibises riding turtles and massive sideboards from
Tuscany—all assiduously preserved from the 1870s.
Amid the famous landscapes of Niagara, the Hudson, the Amazon, the view through the dark cleft of rock to the amber desert light of Ruins at Petra, all of which held the artist’s signature shafts of angel light of gold, and fluid rock, were smaller, darker, unapplauded paintings. In the sitting room were two small landscapes, Sunrise and Moonrise, each the birth of dim light over the edge of a lowland, both somber yet lit. These had been painted to get through the deaths of his oldest two children during a diphtheria epidemic in 1865. On a living room wall over a grand fireplace hung two portraits: one of a stern older man, his father the Hartford industrialist; the other of a younger man with eyes raised to look away, higher and farther, with and toward imagination—his son the artist.
Orville pointed out the small stage of the living room on a platform leading to the grand staircase. The curtain was a Persian carpet hung on brass rings from a brass rail. The Church family loved putting on amateur theatricals with their guests and had a large wardrobe of costumes of silk and satin for pashas and princesses, kings and queens.
Finally, they stood before a ten-foot-high Moorish arched window of amber-colored glass laced with delicate black paper stencils cut out by Church himself, layered between the two panes of glass. The window threw a gold evening light into the room, so buttery a color they felt they could taste it. The amber reminded Orville of Le Grand Souk of Marrakesh. How I miss that world, he thought, the vitality, the expansion. He caught himself. But isn’t that world right here, right now, with this dear, hurting girl? She and I, balanced together on an edge of pain, maybe even of sorrow, keeping our balance by holding each other up and by the potential solace of this art.
“In the days of oil lamps and gas lamps,” the guide was saying, “the amber window was placed there precisely with regard to the changing tilt of the planet, to provide what Church called, in his despair, ‘perpetual sunlight.’”
As the tour ended, a man was waiting for them. He introduced himself as Orlando Durney, director of the Olana Historical Site. He said he had seen their names in the guest book and “Simply had to meet you.” He was bald and tall and slender and kind of splendid in his enthusiasm and clear diction. He wore a lilac dress shirt and red bow tie, the tie wilting in the heat. His most striking feature was a handlebar moustache waxed so severely that Orville imagined it could poke out an eye.