by Shem, Samuel
“Go to hell!”
“I’m stayin’, old sport. I’m a stayer. My life is for shit—thanks to those fuckers out there who are trying to pin every last damn thing on me—thanks to people like you, to the ones who never take a step to try to make things better. For shit, now, and am I runnin’ away? Am I droppin’ out? Think I don’t want to? I want to, but I don’t.”
“You yourself told me to get out, that day in your basement. Told me that if you could, you would too, remember?”
“I want to, but I don’t. You want to, and you do. Call me whaleshit? God!”
They stood in the gathering night, the night now strangely warm, the drip of the last melting ice the only sound. Rage in both sets of eyes. Orville was trembling.
Henry reached inside his jacket.
Orville flashed on their trip down to Henry’s basement, the bullets, the guns. He braced himself, thinking, This is how people get killed. I’ve seen it over and over again this year in emergency.
He grabbed Schooner, one hand on each side of the jacket, grabbed him hard, to keep him from pulling out the gun. He squeezed, bracing himself for a lot of tough muscle fighting him off. To his astonishment Henry’s body wasn’t hard and muscular, but soft and fluid, as if filled with toneless flesh. Air-pocketed. Vacant. Orville felt no gun. He let go and backed off, fingers spread in the air.
“What the fuck?” Henry said, astonished, slowly taking a cigar out of his pocket. And then he got it. “You thought . . .” He blinked. “Me?”
“You bet.”
“You crazy mother!” He reached into another pocket, shaking his head in amazement, and took out a silver cigar cutter. “Is that what you think of me?”
“That’s what I fear about you.”
Meticulously, Henry cut the cigar, lit it, and blew a smoke ring up at the light. “Shit. Runnin’ from the woman who loves you—you don’t even see it, do you? Runnin’ from that sweet boy who loves you like a father? Shit.”
“Running from people like you.”
“Yeah, well, people like me made this country what it is today.”
“Exactly.”
“Can’t run from a town. Y’find another town just like it down the road.”
“What’s it to you? What the hell do you care that I’m leaving?”
“I care ’cause we’re like brothers, and I cared—”
“Oh for Chrissakes! Cut it out!”
“—and I cared about you more’n you cared about me. You’n me are alike, the both of us just tryin’ to catch up to where we are in our lives, right? Your mom was like a mom to me. ‘Henry,’ she said to me, ‘you’re like a good son. I wish Orvy’d be like you.’ I said to her, ‘No, dear, he’s a good son too, just a little rambunctious.’ I stood up for you, respected you, and you spit on me. Everybody always spits on me. Underestimates me. Well, guess what? ‘Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for they will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Matthew 5:10.”
“You’re crazy, really crazy.”
“I always wanted your respect, but now, finally, I don’t give two shits about your contempt. ’Cause you’re at least as low as me. Or as high, brother, or as high.” He puffed on the cigar, thinking. “I’m alone now, all alone. But that’s fine, because I’ll do it myself. I’ll do it the American Way—by your self. Remember, Orvy, you’re born alone, you die alone, and whatever you achieve you do it on your own.”
“Henry?”
“What?”
“You’re not born alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody’s born alone. There’s a mother there, remember?”
“Not for me. Not me. I didn’t even have one. Not one worth anything. And look at me.” Henry spread his arms wide, as if about to flap them in a vain attempt to lift himself up off the porch. “Look.”
Orville did look, then. What he saw surprised him. He saw the kid, the child, the child without a real mother, before he grew big enough to shame and bully and beat up the other kids. He saw the fat, lonesome child.
“So long, Henry. I’m sure you’re gonna be a big success.” He opened the door and took a step into the house.
“Orvy! Lemme in!”
“Sorry, I’m busy. As you said, got someone here who loves me. Night.” He started to shut the door.
“One more thing!”
With Schooner, always. He waited, back turned.
“Give me something.”
“What?” He turned back to face him.
“I need something from you. To remember you by. I respect you and your mom so much. Give me something.”
Orville paused. “Sorry,” he said, and without shutting the door he turned his back and went inside, moving down the dark hall toward the kitchen. He stopped in the kitchen doorway and glanced back. Henry was still there on the porch. Orville stood staring from the dark. He could see Henry, but Henry couldn’t see him.
Henry’s arms stayed up for a while longer and then flapped down to his sides. His head dropped down, too. The whole refrigerator of the man seemed to melt, defrost. He turned around and trudged down the porch steps toward the front gate and his empty house.
Do something kind, Orville thought. Break the cycle. Do something kind.
Orville looked around the kitchen.
PhwweeeeeEEEETT!!
He grabbed the birdcage and the Mexican blanket he used to cover it at night and hurried back up the hallway and out the front door.
“Henry?”
He was at the crosswalk in the middle of the square. He stopped, stood still for a moment with his back to Orville, and then turned around. “Yeah?”
“Here.” Orville walked down the walk and Henry walked toward him and they met on the edge of the square. “This is for you.”
Henry stared at the bird.
The bird stared at Henry.
PhwweeeeeEEEETT!!
Henry’s eyes widened. He smiled. A smile, Orville sensed, not of appreciation so much as victory.
“Hold the cage by the ring at the top,” Orville said. He passed it to Henry’s waiting index finger. The lovebird migrated from one man’s life to another’s.
“What’s its name?”
“Starlight.”
“Starlight.” He nodded and smiled. “Orvy, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Just take care of it. Here, cover it up—cover it with this blanket at night. The three things that can kill it are drafts, chocolate, and avocado.”
“Drafts, chocolate . . .” he seemed to cherish these words, “and avocado.”
They stared at each other.
“Better get it home. Drafts, remember?”
“Drafts . . . chocolate . . .”
“Henry?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re standing in a puddle.”
Henry looked down. He was up to his ankles in a puddle of ice water. When he looked up he was beaming, triumphant, like a child glad to be muddy and wet. As he jumped up lightly from the puddle he called out, “Unhappy feet! Unhappy feet! Yes!”
Holding the cage high he moved quickly away, so quickly that soon, seen from a distance, he and the lovebird seemed to be riding the rising mist, a few inches off the ground.
· 36 ·
“What did he want?” Miranda asked, as Orville came back into the room. She was still sitting on the bed.
“Who knows. He wanted . . . well, he wanted everything. Respect. Revenge. Wanted to beat me up, and wanted friendship. Adoration. Maybe denigration too. Kindness.”
“And you gave him—?”
“Starlight.”
“You didn’t!”
“Nobody else wants her. He went dancing off with her through the puddles like in a film, and they both seemed happy.”
She laughed. “I g
uess Nelda Jo will take care of her.”
“If she comes back.”
“If?”
“Just a feeling.” He was standing in the turret, staring out the window at the air space where he’d often seen Selma. Again, it was as if he were seeing himself out there, in her place, looking in at Miranda and him, both older, taking care of a teenaged Cray who was sick with the flu in Orville’s old bed.
“What?” Miranda asked, staring at him.
“What’s that?”
“You drifted off.”
“Oh. Yeah. I was just seeing myself—and you and Cray—in the future.”
She looked at him and nodded.
He glanced out the window again. Nothing, except Henry’s lit-up house.
“Y’know,” he said, “when I first came back, sitting in front of the TV I had the sense that while I’d been away America had turned. . . . Turned, definitely turned. But I didn’t know what to. Now I do.”
“And?”
“To Schooners. To the big disconnect.”
“What does that mean?”
“I means I’m still way too bitter, that’s all.” He picked up the large framed photo and laid it on the floor at her feet. At the bottom was an inscription, scratched by hand with a sharp point into black, so that the letters came out silver:
20TH ANNIVERSARY
BANQUET AND BALL OF THE
FIRST STANISLAUER YOUNG MEN’S
BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION
SUN. DEC. 30, 1923
AT THE LEXINGTON HALL
He got down on his hands and knees and studied it. Jews. Immigrants. A sea of faces, hundreds of them, flowing out to the horizon of a gaslit grand ballroom. In front, the faces were large, with the sharp detail those big, glass-plate cameras of the day could give. Every eye and nose, every Jazz Age hairdo, every birthmark. In the back, amid the fuzz the long exposure made of the flickering gas lamps, the faces seemed indistinguishable from one another. Almost all were seated at round tables. They were dressed to the teeth—the men in black tie, the white Vs of their shirts beneath their dark jackets making them look like a colony of penguins, and the women in grand dresses, mostly black, brocaded or silk, with oval necklines graced with gold and pearls. Flappers.
And the faces! They’d been told to “hold still.” This generation of immigrant Jews, fleeing the pogroms, built low to the ground for speed, about to “hold still”? Yet most had, except for the few young children sitting on laps, who came out as blurred as the gas flames. The enforced stillness made them look stiff. The men’s faces, even on this gala occasion, seemed somber or sternly ambitious, skeptical or fearful. The women seemed worried. There was only a rare hint of a held smile. Napkins were tucked into old men’s shirts. Many of the young men’s arms were around the young women’s shoulders and necks, or vice versa. Across the top of the photo, like a halo over the fearful, were the smears of the flames of the gas chandeliers.
Stuck in the back of the frame was an envelope addressed to him in Selma’s hand.
Orville and Miranda glanced at each other.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Oh, come on. She can’t hurt you now.”
“Wanna bet?” He opened the letter and read it out loud.
Hi, flier!
This is a photo my mother left me. It’s the burial society, the Stanislauers. You’ll find the plot out in Queens, where mom and pop and my sister are buried. Just ask anyone there for “Stanislauer.” (Be careful of the Hassids For Hire at the gates. They say prayers for cash—Jewish, but gonif.) The name of their town in Poland. The one thing the Jews saved money for and wanted more than anything when they came to the New World was to have a place to be buried with people they knew, with people from their hometown. So they chipped in and held benefits like this and got the money to buy the plots. It turned social, as it does with Jews usually. Jewish holidays are everybody moaning and groaning about death and that Holocaust thing and then somebody says “Okay, let’s eat!” So this is one of their balls.
Can you find me and Lil and Sam and Molly? Probably not. The Four Fleishers are the only ones not sitting down, standing along the right-hand wall (actually, Lil is sitting, but her new shoes made her feet hurt, and when a person’s feet hurt you can always see it in their face). We all look pretty good, all things considered. Dad, the metalworker who worked on skyscrapers, had been nicknamed—because of his daring, way up high there—“The Flying Fleisher.” So we called ourselves “The Four Flying Fleishers.” Too bad we had no act. I’m on the left. Cute, eh? I was ten years old.
While I’ve got you, two things. First of all, about mice. There was a report and a warning to all about the lethal Hanukah air virus created by mouse droppings. All produce and packaged stuff and even cans are subject to droppings and urine of rodents in storehouses and markets. Everything should be washed carefully because dust as well as the animals can be on most anything. Second, a question about your Buddhism. Spiritual, okay. But is it Jewish?
Enjoy Mom
Orville and Miranda looked at each other.
“Oh boy,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Watch out for those mouse droppings!”
“You can say that again.”
She laughed. He heard it as music, as before.
“Which one is she?” Miranda asked, leaning closer to him.
“Here.” In shadow stood Sam, short and strong. Towering over him and twice his girth was Molly. Next in line, sitting in half-shadow, with Molly’s bulk and a dark patterned headband across her forehead that made her look like the last of the Jewish Mohicans, was Lil, aged eighteen. And then, against the wall on the edge of the family, stood ten-year-old Selma.
“I’ll get my magnifying glass,” Orville said.
With heads close together, they looked through the glass at the portrait of his mother as a girl. She was all in white. Around her lily-white swan’s neck, pearls disappeared down into the oval neckline of her dress. Her arms were at her sides, and her dark hair was bobbed and captured in a white headband, a purer statement than her sister’s dark one.
She had a face that took his breath away—oval, simple, elegant. Her straight nose fell from arched dark brows down to a plump ellipse of lips. There was a classic symmetry of her face—a Modigliani, like Celestina! And then the eyes. Those ten-year-old eyes, full of frailty, curiosity, intelligence. What else? They were steady. Unsteady. Sure. Unsure. Questioning. Hoping to hope and fearing to hope. They conveyed an overwhelming openness and, he thought, in their wistfulness, a precocious nostalgia.
“Amazing eyes!” Miranda said. “Such innocence there, such hope!”
“Truly. Wide open.”
“Like the photo of Anne Frank.”
“Yes. And like what I used to see in Amy.”
“And I still do in Cray, though less and less.”
“I know.” He looked again. “You can almost see in her eyes that she really did have a vision then, even a dream. One time this summer, when you were away, Amy and I were talking about having a vision for our lives, and she asked me if I thought Selma’s vision had died here.”
“And you said?”
“I didn’t. But seeing this . . .” He sighed. “If she’s ten, here, she . . . yeah, she was something of a child prodigy as a pianist. She would’ve been playing on New York radio by then, WQXR. Smart, too. She’d already started high school, and—”
“At ten?”
“In the City, they skipped kids, then, if they were really smart. She graduated high school at thirteen, Hunter College at sixteen. She had a bright future, real bright.”
“She never mentioned . . .” Miranda said. “Never played for me.” She took the magnifying glass. “How beautiful she is—she almost glows!”
Orville stared at her, at this girl who was standing so shyly there, wanting only to live out her small dr
eam, and in her slight fear he saw the bruised woman he knew. How had it happened? When had she started to float? She was so gifted. Everything was moving along nicely—Bach, Beethoven, even Debussy—a college degree in botany and then, during the Depression, she went to work at the New York State Employment Office, where she met a coworker named Solomon Rose. She married and went off to war with him in North Carolina and had children and saw Sol’s limits and decided to divorce him before I was born but didn’t and tagged along with him to Columbia and was a housewife and turned bitter. And then she got dizzy and was mutilated and turned again, becoming savage in private, saintly in public. A force of nature. A gift.
Orville had a glimpse, then, of the enormity of her wound, and of how hard she had fallen. How, broken and cornered, she had taken it out on those she loved. In that simple understanding, in seeing her this way, his anger left him. Everything changed, and there passed through him, as lightly as a breath through fog, a sense of sorrow. Tears came to his eyes. Understanding, sorrow, love—maybe they’re just different words for the same thing? Understand, and you love. Love, and you understand.
Miranda put a hand on his shoulder. “What?”
“It’s just so sad,” he said, “so damn sad. I feel so bad for her! So much pain. And she was alone with it. There was no way in.”
“For her.”
“For me, for any of us. She got what she feared. She was, in a way, terrific, and she ended up so desperately alone.” He struggled to breathe. “Except, maybe here in town, with people like you?”
“In a way. She did do wonderful things here, but yes, she was so unhappy, so unhappy in secret. I never really saw it.”