by Shem, Samuel
Penny had good reason to be enraged. Not only had Orville provoked her husband’s public humiliation, but he had missed the unveiling of their mother’s tombstone
“You did it on purpose!” Penny said, eyes full of venom, when Orville arrived after everyone else had left.
“No,” he said, “I swear not. I’d been up for two days straight and was finishing up another all-nighter doing a delivery way out in Red Rock and I got into the Chrysler and was going as fast as I could down 66 to get there and nodded off once, and woke up, but then the line down the middle of the road started wobbling again and I nodded off again and only woke up when I felt the car shudder off the road—I pulled out of it just in time. I was too tired to see straight, to drive. I fell asleep—it was a deep sleep and I missed everything and I’m sincerely sorry, Pen. I overslept, okay?”
“No. Your oversleeping is your unconscious hatred for your mother.”
“Hey, I love my mother. Selma’s a great Columbian.”
“Do not mock me, okay? I mean, even after a whole year when you’re supposed to be mourning her you hate her more. You should go under psychoanalysis—fast!”
“I was nodding off in the car! People die that way! You’d rather have me dead?”
“Don’t tempt me but I’ve had it with you and when are you leaving?”
“The 27th. I get the check that day, and I’m gone.”
“For sure?”
“Got my ticket.”
“One way?”
“That’s sweet.”
“No, it isn’t. Your leaving Columbia, leaving us with one less doctor, is one of those good news/bad news situations.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, but not the way you think. You think it’s bad for Columbia and good for you, but I’ve got news for you—it’s the opposite. You’ve done a lot of harm here this year and we’ll all be better off without you.”
“Thanks, Sis.”
“You’re welcome. The problem was that you got our expectations up—me, Amy, even, would you believe it, Milt. Over the years we’d gotten used to expecting nothing from you, so your staying for a while was more than we bargained for. But now, hell, it’s clear that you were just doing it for the money. I wouldn’t like to live in your head for a day, even for a million! Thank God you’re going. When you’re gone we’ll be all set. We can all get back to normal.”
Her viciousness rocked him. He still felt shaky three days later.
And so it was August 6th, his first real birthday. That morning he’d gone up to the attic of his mother’s house to the Scomparza Moving and Funeral box. He found the pile of Selma’s letters and took the top one off the pile. It was marked “Number 15, To Be Mailed On the Eleventh Month and First Week He Is Back.” He opened it and read:
Dear son,
Maybe writing these letters to you is having an effect on me.
I had a strange thought today. It brought tears to my good eye.
Maybe you weren’t running from me, you were running for me.
I can’t write anymore now, dear, I’m crying too hard to see.
Til next time,
Love, Mom
Orville was surprised, touched. He remembered as a boy lying next to her on the couch, his head on her breast, his grandmother Molly sitting in her rocker, all of them watching what his grandmother always referred to as “The Ed Solomon Show”—mistakenly thinking Ed was Jewish. Lying there, feeling his mother’s breathing. Soft rise, soft fall. Feeling her laugh at the jokes on the show.
He looked at the letter again, turned it over, searching for the dagger, the way that, whenever she opened him up, she would plunge the knife in.
No dagger.
He reached into the box and picked up the next letter, “Number 16, To Be Mailed on the Eleventh Month and Second Week That He Is Back.” It felt light. The flap was unsealed. He looked inside. It was empty.
He looked back down into the box again, and took the next one off the pile. “Number 17, To Be Mailed On the Eleventh Month and Third Week That He Is Back.” This one, too, was unsealed and empty. And so it was with all the rest of the letters. They were marked to be mailed at closer and closer intervals until the year and thirteen days was up, two a week for a couple of weeks and then one a day for the last seven days. All of them were empty. Stamped, but empty.
Sometime between Letter Number 15 and Letter Number 16 his mother had died. He flashed on her complaining in previous letters about her indigestion, brought on by exertion, and not helped by Maalox. Bill had blown the diagnosis. It wasn’t indigestion, it was angina, her heart.
Orville felt light-headed, and slumped down onto the rough dusty planks of the attic floor. She’s dead. This meant she really was dead. No more letters. She was out of touch for good. He felt sick to his stomach.
“Running for her?”
It was a long lonely day doctoring. Longer and lonelier for it being his fortieth birthday and no one else knowing it. No “Happy Birthdays!” to carry him through the day and no one to welcome him home. That evening as he trudged through the sluggish damp night from Bill’s office to Selma’s house, his heart was heavy and his spirit sunken. His feet hit the warm pavement softly, sadly. At the entrance to the Courthouse Square he had a sense of being watched and raised his eyes.
There she was! Not flying, hovering only a few feet above him, at the level of a first branch of an oak. He felt a strange relief—glad to see her now that she was somehow more dead. Her head was turned away from him. She was not wearing the cobalt-blue satin gown but something white—maybe a housedress? And she had something on her head, also white—a white hat?
“Selma?”
She did not respond.
“Your indigestion? Remember your indigestion?”
Still she floated there, at the level of the oak branch, facing away, and silent.
“Bill blew it. It wasn’t acid reflux, it was your heart.”
Nothing.
“Mom?”
On this she turned toward him. He reeled back, in shock. Her face was hideous, one facial nerve cut by the surgeons so that half of her face was fallen, as if in sorrow, and one eye was sewn shut with black sutures, to protect the cornea because she could no longer blink. The white housedress was a hospital gown and the white hat was a turban to wrap her head and cover the hairless flap of skin over the hole drilled in her skull. He lost his breath and stumbled back. It was how she had looked when she’d come home that morning from the hospital, when he, taking one look at this woman he’d always seen as beautiful and being totally unprepared for anything being wrong with her, anything at all, had run out of the house across the square and down into the woods. In that first moment he hadn’t stayed with her, and he hadn’t stayed with her all summer.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
Instead of an answer, a look of inconsolable sadness passed over her mutilated face. She floated away.
Shaken, he groped for a park bench and sat down. Trying to catch his breath, he stared at her house. It was dark, forboding. How can I go in there?
Sounds from Schoonerland came from behind him. Rock music. Must be Junior. Was Henry back? He turned to look, thinking he might go over. But the oversized sign on the front lawn—VOTE AMERICA VOTE SCHOONER—was a deterrent. Breathing more easily, he took out a Parodi cigar and lit it. The sharp taste stimulated a craving for bourbon and a cold beer, which lived in the house. He got up and walked slowly, shakily, toward Selma’s house, thinking, Now I’ve even been rejected by the dead.
The front door was unlocked. Strange. He’d been locking the door ever since a break-in last month, a “Below Fourth Streeter” looking for drugs in his doctor’s bag. Had he forgotten to lock it this morning? Not like me. Is Amy home? Hayley? But there were no lights on. He went in cautiously.
“Amy?” No answer. “Hayley?” N
one. He tried again, louder. Nothing. A touch of fear. He shivered. Hayley always waited around if she knew he was coming home, and she knew tonight. They would talk and watch TV while he ate. A comfort. He thought he remembered Amy saying that they would all have dinner together tonight. Something was wrong. And then he realized that Starlight wasn’t shrieking. The bird always shrieked when he came in. Better than a watchdog. Something was definitely wrong.
He picked up an umbrella from the stand in the hall. Scared, he tiptoed down the dark hallway to the kitchen door, raised his umbrella, and opened the door and felt something roar and come crashing down on him and saw a flash of light. As he reflexively slashed out with the umbrella, he realized that the crash was a hand slapping his back and thrusting him further into the room and that the light was from flashbulbs and the roar was Columbians shouting “Surprise! Surprise!” A banner read: “HAPPY FORTY-ETH AND FAIRWELL!”
Like a rowboat on a friendly lake, Orville floated among friends and dear nurses and hospital workers and patients and enemies. Someone took the blanket off Starlight’s cage and the bird began to shriek. Going person to person and then blowing out the candles and cutting the cake, Orville was touched. As he stood between the small squat Hayley and the taller, thinner Amy, Orville, feeling appreciated, felt appreciative. At one point, looking into Hayley’s eyes—noticing behind the thick glasses the gathering clouds of cataracts and thinking she should have those done, but not here, up in Albany—he said, “This is great! Thanks!”
“So, O.,” Hayley said, “you finally believe people care?”
“Everybody but you, maybe.”
“Gimmee a break!” she said, punching him on the arm.
“‘I see,’ said the blind man, and he picked up his hammer and saw.” It was Hayley’s favorite proverb and he’d heard it ever since he was a kid. She smiled.
Milt was thrust forward by Penny. Milton Plotkin the Patriarch held a plaque. Under duress, sweat pouring down off his forehead onto his chins, his eyes twitching as if, Orville thought, in a nascent case of Tourette’s. “You and me have had our differences, Orvy, like in hotel management.”
No one laughed.
“Just read the plaque, Milt,” Penny said tightly.
“But, in fact,” Milt went on, trying to recover, “it hasn’t been all that bad having you here.” This, too, went over like a lead balloon.
“Daddy, stop!” Amy said. “Just read it?”
Milt held up the plaque, one of those blue historic markers they put on buildings.
HERE LIVED THE TOWN DOCTOR
ORVILLE ABRAHAM ROSE
AUGUST 14, 1983–AUGUST 27, 1984
“Jesus, Milt,” Orville said, “you make it sound like I’ve died.”
“Maybe you have,” Milt said, “and this, with me, is Heaven!” Finally, a laugh.
Henry Schooner, exuding the wholesome scent of toasted oats, rode the laughter to the front of the crowd. The marvelous public Voice made some brief remarks, ending with, “I knew Orvy as a boy, I knew his mother as a great lady when I, too, was a boy, and a great mother, and now I can say from the bottom of my heart that Orvy the boy has grown up to be Orville Abraham Rose the man—a fine man, our very own, however brief, ‘Dear and Glorious Physician.’ He’s cared for us for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—”
“What’re you gonna do, honey,” Nelda Jo called out, “marry him?”
“We can all dream, Mother,” Henry replied, “can’t we?”
Everybody thought this was about the funniest thing going.
“And Dr. Orville Rose,” Henry went on, “has shown us something incredibly important: that despite our differences we can all work together for the good of Columbia, the good of America, and the good of the world. It’s like what a friend of mine who lives in New York City told me the other day, when I asked how he could possibly stand to live there. ‘It sucks,’ he said, ‘but we’re all in it together.’” He paused. “Well, friends, we’re one up on New York City, as our dear friends the New Yorkers who have come to Columbia to live and make their fortunes can attest to—in our town it doesn’t suck, it shines!” As he said it, his face, too, seemed to shine. “Yes, friends, it shines, and it shined brighter this whole year with our dear town doctor here, the good doctor Rose. Yes, it shines, and we’re all in it together. God bless you, Orville, and—”
Many in the crowd shouted out with him, “and God bless America!”
“And vote Schooner!” someone cried out. “Vote early and often in the Republican primary on September the 15th.”
Henry smiled, and said, “Thank you. One more thing. In Orvy’s name, Nelda Jo and Junior and Maxie and I are donating the use of Schooner’s Spa three hours per week for disabled boys and girls of Columbia. The Orville Rose Memorial Hours will start next month. Thank you, friends, and, again, may the Good Lord bless you and keep you.”
Pure kitsch, Orville thought, but he’s right. A town this size, you have to get along. People who hate each other for a time are nice to each other for another time—like tonight with Milt, Americo, Packy, and others. One minute they’re screwing you, the next they’re friends with you, and there’s no connection in between. What’s real? What’s fake? Who cares? Maybe Selma was right in her rules—SO WHAT? and WHAT’S NEXT?
Looking around, he realized that over the year he’d doctored just about everybody in the room, except the Schooners and Penny and Milt. I know all their secrets, he said to himself, have kept their secrets, and when I see them out in the world I hear all their lies—and they see me hearing their lies. As Bill had said, “In this office, you lift up the lid and look at the truth.” Corny as it sounds, he thought, the right word is “privilege.” Yeah, it has been a kind of privilege. And the most corny thing is that they seem sad to see me go.
Penny, too, showed no sign of her prior viciousness. She handed him a present from her and Amy. A black sweatshirt, on the front of which, spelled out in glittering sequins, was:
ROME
PARIS
LONDON
COLUMBIA
Toby oop den Dyke gave him a framed blowup of the photo of Orville chained to the GENE HOT —which got a lot of laughs, even from Packy and Americo and Milt—and Tommy Kline and Whiz, cocaptains of the Fish Hawk basketball team, gave him an old framed black-and-white photo of the three of them holding aloft a trophy with the caption FISH HAWKS IN ROMP TO CLASS B TITLE, 1962. Johnny Holsapple, a smart classmate turned into dairy farmer, presented him with a brass cow engraved with BOTHWAYS FARM, WEST GHENT. Orlando Durney gave him a framed photo of himself and Selma in front of a dilapidated Olana, clearly before the start of Selma’s campaign. Americo’s two gifts to him were a key to the city and no official remarks. Mrs. Tarr, pigeon free, had done a pen-and-ink sketch of the one-room Ichabod Crane Schoolhouse where he’d first met Miranda—which tipped his heart over and sent it plunging weightlessly down into nowhere.
“Speech, Orvy, speech!”
Shyly, Orville rose to speak. Someone called out, “Look out for breakage!” People elbowed each other, laughing, but glanced around furtively, some in fact positioning themselves along the sightlines and pathways for safe exit from the house.
“When I came here a year ago,” he began, “I thought it would be, well . . . a kind of hell. But now, while I can’t exactly call it a kind of heaven, it’s been a year filled with . . .” He stopped. They’re gone! Miranda and Cray, gone! He stopped, unable to shake it. He tried to breathe. For a few seconds he was silent. Finally, fighting tears, and with his voice trembling, he said, “with love for those who are no longer with us. Thanks.”
Silence, broken by sniffles and coughs. Stillness.
Many times in his travels Orville had experienced moments like this, when a gathering of people falls silent, and then still, at about eleven at night. All over the world, he found, people would give the same expla
nation for the stillness: it was a sign of angels passing overhead.
Could it be? he asked himself now. Here in Columbia? In the ongoing stillness, he considered it. Maybe it could. I mean, how could you ever prove that it wasn’t?
And then, like Fish Hawk hoopsters after a moment of prayer in the locker room before the big game with the dread Niskayuna, the crowd broke. Talk and laughter and shouts and cries and party tricks like picking up a chair by one leg with one hand resumed and carried the Columbians along. The group split into smaller and smaller ones and then the niggle of babysitters and the next day’s work and dyspepsia and sciatica and rheumatica saw most of them take their leave.
Just after midnight, as Hayley and Amy and Orville were cleaning up the plates, glasses, and cigarette and cigar butts, the front doorbell rang. Orville went to answer it.
Miranda Braak. Before he could say anything he heard a cry and felt something hit him in the stomach, almost bringing him down, and he knew it was Cray.
“Hi, Orvy—” the boy started to say but then he was overwhelmed with joy and started bawling like a baby. Orville started to cry too. The boy wanted to hide his tears, and so Orville pulled him up into the crook of his neck, the boy’s hair against his cheek, both of them crying. Orville recalled for the first time in his life how, when he was Cray’s age and had been taken by Selma for a month-long trip to California to see Selma’s crippled Aunt Anna and hadn’t really thought of Sol at all the whole time, when the old propeller plane had touched down back at La Guardia and he had seen his father, he had felt a breakout of love and had found himself crying crazily and doing just what Cray was doing now, burying his face in his dad’s neck. And then he had started talking, talking wildly about California and the paddle boats at Catalina Island and Disneyland and the tar pits and the farmers’ market—and that’s what Cray started doing now, only it was about North Dakota and the seas of wheat and Auntie Heyward’s farm and the horses and the pigs.
The boy in his arms, he turned to Miranda across the threshold. As gently as one would brush aside a stray tear, they each took the one step to each other, he sensing that she was stepping with her good leg, she realizing how substantial he was in real life and how he’d lost matter in her memory during the months apart, and then there they were, Cray and Miranda and Orville all in each other’s arms, crying like crazy.