by Peter Orner
Not in his dreams, in the morning, in the den, in his chair, awake.
When she died, it all got more vivid. The specter of her sitting and watching. She left the same way. That morning she’d been talking about craving fresh cucumber salad. When was the last time I had cucumber salad? At my aunt Gert’s in the fifties? As she napped in the guest room with her clothes on, a stroke took her away, on a Monday afternoon. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known her. He had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had, in her way. And she’d always been Rosie, always the girl in the red dress who got the twice-over from sailors and sauced it right back. Still, she always held herself, not alone, apart. Maybe this was why people craved her sole attention. When the kids were little and even after they’d gone away, they were still always trying to get their mother away from Herb in order to be listened to, beg advice, confess. They didn’t want Herb’s bigheartedness, his hugs, his compassion. Mom, I shoplifted. Mom, I’m strung out. Mom, I’m getting a divorce. Mom, I’m broke again. Mom, I’m tired, I can’t figure out why I’m so so tired all the time. And she’d stare back at them as if they were strangers. No answers or empathy or even comfort. But something. What did you give—what? Tell me. Talk to me, Ro, I’ll listen. Herb in his chair by the window, overlooking her azaleas. The glare of the sun white now against the glass. A frenzied waiter douses a blazing tinsel palm tree with seltzer water, and Rosalie laughs, raises a long, thin finger slowly to her lips, and breathes, Let it come, Herb, just let it come—
My old boss E.J. once told me he was famous for goofy hats. This was when he worked the lock-in ward at Hennepin County. The hats, E.J. said, came to represent his solidarity with the ones called patients. One day he’d wear a sombrero, the next a feathered Tyrolean, the day after that a plastic hard hat with placeholders for two beers they gave away free at a Twins game. He said they began to trust him and treat him as if he were one of them, which meant they toned down the loony and just talked to him the way they talked among themselves, which was like everybody else in the world talks to everybody else in the world, normal with a touch of nuts. E.J. told me this as he lay in a bed at Nicollett Methodist. How that job on the psych ward was less about the daily incidents of mayhem, which he could recall vividly, than a sense of camaraderie he’d never felt before or since. Looking back, he wondered whether he hadn’t been most alive, most in tune with his fellow men, those years he worked the lock-in. They trusted me, E.J. said. They had not a thing left to lose. This was when he could talk, because in the weeks and days before he died, he stopped talking altogether and only screamed if you went near him. The nurses needed two orderlies to hold him down to give him his shots. Last I spoke to him was on the phone. I put the receiver down on the table and just listened.
MINNEAPOLIS, 1997
AT THE KITCHEN TABLE
The lady officer told her if she wanted a family burial she’d have to make special arrangements for him to be retrieved. The state will assume all burial costs if this isn’t the case, but in such case he can’t be buried anywhere but in the Department of Corrections’ own plot in Murfreesboro. In whichever case, she, Mrs. Alper, the lady officer said, was required to come up to Caledonia tomorrow morning to sign identification papers and to collect personal items such as are wanted. The rest will be properly disposed of. But please, Mrs. Alper, understand, if you wish to take your son’s body home, you must be accompanied by a licensed mortician and a funeral services vehicle. Then she said in a lower, different voice, a voice that nearly recognized the notion of sorrow: You can’t take him home in your own car is what I’m saying is D.O.C. policy.
Mrs. Alper? Hello? Are you there? Mrs. Alper?
Jean Alper at the kitchen table, Gastonia, North Carolina. September 1986. Tomorrow is tomorrow. The phone is on the floor. It’s ceased to repeat itself. There may be other sounds out the open kitchen window, but she doesn’t hear them. Someone might be mowing a lawn. She wouldn’t know. It’s still today and he’s lying on his back someplace they keep cold. It’s cold where they’ve got him, and she imagines a large walk-in refrigerator stacked tall with frozen breaded chicken patties and white plastic buckets of soup, frost growing up his fingernails, across his eyelids. She wants to laugh. It’s June. So cold. She tired, Lord, did she tire. Maybe she could have tried harder, but with Aubrey dead and her brothers so far away and her working nine, ten hours a day, it was hard. She could have moved them away from here, but where? Charlotte? She didn’t know anybody in Charlotte. She knew hardly anybody in Gastonia anymore. Anyway, some years you had to sit tight with what you had. Well, I can make excuses till kingdom come and they won’t call an undertaker or iron a decent dress by 5:30 tomorrow morning. At least three hours to Murfreesboro, and shouldn’t she be there by nine? He did what he wanted, stubborn as his father, but Aubrey, when it came down to it, was all bluster. Knock the man over with your finger. Jordy, though, never afraid of anything or anybody. Since he was three and tearing up the carpet, her tomato plants, hair of neighbors’ daughters. The neighbors called him Pixie Terror until he got so big so fast he was just Terror. Then they didn’t call him anything. Her fingers thump the table in the silence. So cold. It isn’t as if she doesn’t have people to call. Vince in Wilmington and Dave and Julia in Louisville. It’s how to say it. Who’d believe it? That it was only simple fear. Jordy? Man the size of a small office building. Because inside there something happened. Supposed to, right? Supposed to change you, right? On visiting days she’d say, What, baby, what? Him sitting there fiddling with his shirt like it had a button, but there were no buttons. They hurting you? Somebody touching you? And him shaking his head, not that, and waving her away and coughing and laughing and saying, Stupid enough to end up here, stupid enough to be rattled by the doors. And when she drove home that day, she thought she understood. So easy. Funny almost, doors. As if he expected there not to be any.
The way he said it, like doors existed independent of what he was doing in there, and yet she understood. There’s doors and there’s doors. Once, another day, he’d rammed his head against the wall in that little ferociously lit room like she wasn’t there at all, kept doing it and doing it and doing it, until the guard came and pulled her away, his forehead gashed and pouring. It wasn’t a steady descent to wherever the fear was taking him; it was slow, and some visiting days it wouldn’t be there at all. Some days he let her touch him, his body falling so heavily into hers he’d almost knock her over. A few of the guards were kind. They sometimes looked at her as if she were a vision of their own mother driving four-plus hours to be humiliated, to be searched, to have the insides of her thighs patted down for the love of a son who didn’t deserve it. Lots of guys had to talk to their visitors through the glass, but for Jordy Alper’s mother they unlocked the lawyers’ room, and Jordy would say, All right, Ma, in here you have to talk like a lawyer. How’s my appeal going? And she’d say all she could think of to say, which was I’ve been filing motions galore for you, honey, and it’s all a wait-and-see, and sometimes his hands would grip the table in order to talk and he’d say things he never said in his life, like Tell me about you, Ma, talk about you, and she’d try and he’d listen, clutching the edge of the table. Mostly he stopped shaving, but some days she’d get there and he’d be clean-shaven and this made it worse, not because he was so pale and bleeding at the chin but because he’d want so much out of it. He’d force himself to laugh hard and long at her stories and smile with his face when he talked, and watching him perform would exhaust her, and he’d read this exhaustion in her eyes and stand up and call the guard and say, Let her go home. No, who’d believe it? My God, so cold. But hadn’t anybody ever noticed that even after he sprouted up taller than his father and uncles, he still slouched into rooms like he was embarrassed about something? Because people turned from the boy. They always had. She’s making excuses. He was a chubby baby with fat, grippable elbows. He never cried, only yelped sometimes, and some nights Aubrey couldn’t stand to be near his own son,
because he said the baby looked at him with eyes that weren’t a baby’s. Sorrow’s years different from sadness. Maybe she’s always known this. She looks at the table. There’s a small plate with a half-eaten piece of toast. She doesn’t remember it. Sadness, always lots of it, but this is something new and will become part of her in a way Aubrey’s absence never has. The call a shock and nothing at all like a shock. Sitting right here, the phone rings, the lady officer says words, and all of it the start of something she always knew she’d be.
Your husband dies, you’re a widow. There’s not even a word for what I am now. Jordy, my only only. Why not scream it? She sits, motionless now, already hating two tongue waggers from work, Brenda and Denise. (You hear it? About Jean’s son? Awful, just terrible, but that boy was bad bad news. Made holy terror look like Donny Osmond.) Funny, isn’t it? Hilarious—and then they talk about you in the parking lot.
Early summer, just after nine in the morning. The window’s open. The curtain bloats, settles. Jean Alper’s feet are flat on the floor. It will be a long time before the crickets shriek. She’ll wait right here.
GRAND PACIFIC HOTEL, CHICAGO, 1875
One hotel maid said her screeching resembled the sound of a peacock. Far more alarming was Mrs. Lincoln’s silence. Late at night she would dress and roam the shoe-lined corridors of the hotel as if she were searching for something in all those hallways that looked identical to everyone but her. It was those shoes. All those shoes waiting to be shined like the ghosts of so many feet.
And the corridors themselves seemed to change every time she wandered down them. There were nights, early mornings, when she couldn’t find her way back to her room. Even she changed—moment by moment—and this is why there are no safe harbors anywhere. Even our own bodies betray us, every moment of every day. Even you people who understand nothing must understand this. Don’t you see? Motion is where the loss is. If we could only be still. But then how to search? How to find?
RAILROAD MEN’S HOME
Henry’s enemy lived in the room next door. Sometimes I saw him in the hall carrying his portable television. That TV was cradled in his arm the day I shouted, I need help, Henry’s fallen down. The man walked calmly into Henry’s room and set the TV down on the floor. Then he knelt and checked Henry’s pulse at the neck, professionally, using two fingers.
“Poor sap,” he said. “He thought I’d go before him.”
“There’s no hope?”
“Someone should alert Sister Harris. She’ll want to get the room ready for the next contestant. This is prime real estate. Two windows. Most of us only have one. Can you imagine? One window?”
“Would it be all right if I had a little time?” I said.
“Of course, they’ll want to fumigate it first.”
“A few minutes, only to—”
“Who are you, anyway? A grandson? Nephew hoping for an inheritance? Pennies under the mattress? Don’t kid yourself.”
“I’m one of the listeners.”
“Listeners are supposed to spread the visits around.”
“I know.”
“You don’t think the rest of us aren’t about ready to croak? He had you convinced he was the only one?”
Together, we lifted Henry off the floor. It was surprising how light he was. We hoisted too quickly. Like when you brace yourself to raise a log that turns out to be hollow. We set Henry gently on the bed. His enemy wrenched off his tennis shoes without untying the laces. He studied Henry in his clean white tube socks. Henry was fastidious. He shaved twice a day, once in the morning and once, he said, at teatime. His enemy was on the fat side and had small, sharp teeth like a ferret’s.
“You hated him back?” I said.
The man snorted and sat down on the one chair in the room. “No. My enemy is Vern in East Wing.” He spoke to the corpse. “How about a truce, Henry? Okay? Bygones be all gones?”
I laughed.
“I’m meaning this sincerely.”
“You tortured him with the TV.”
“Look, I’m hard of hearing. For years I invited him over for Johnny Carson. And Tom Snyder’s show. He would have liked Tom Snyder. Snyder’s an intellectual, just like—”
“He said you could hear your TV in Milwaukee. He said you took a shower with it.”
“Now these are exaggerations.”
Henry’s last words to me, only a few minutes before all this, were “I tire of you.” It wasn’t the first time he put it that way. I’d always worried that my too-open eyes and never knowing what to say were literally boring him to death. Now I’d done it, I’d murdered him. Henry’s enemy looked like he was about to doze off, the TV cuddled against his chest like a baby. I walked over to the bulletin board and looked at the new Goya picture. I would check out art books for Henry from the library. He’d rip out the color plates and tack them up. Goya was his favorite. Henry claimed Goya was one of the few artists who truly understood the nature of everyday degradation. Cervantes, too. Look to the Spanish. They’ve been shat on enough to understand. This latest Goya was a drawing of a man hanging by the neck from a branch. A woman standing on the ground below him was reaching up into the man’s mouth.
“His teeth,” Henry had said. “See how it goes? Napoleon’s dragoons rape and pillage. You get strung up. All is quiet. After that, some crone sneaks up and rips off your dentures.”
I looked at the dangling man, his baggy pants, his sad feet. What good were his teeth to him now?
My job was to listen, to be a kind ear was how it was put to me, but often Henry would demand that I talk. About what? Anything, he’d say. Just talk. I told him the truth about anything I could think of. About not being sorry my dog ran away, about my lack of friends. About my parents and what strangers they were to each other. I told him the last thing I wanted to do after school was go home. He took no pity on me, which is probably why I kept showing up. Sometimes he’d hold up his hand and in this way demand silence. It was in those moments we might have known each other best, and even appreciated each other’s company.
Once, Henry said, “You know what?”
“What?”
“You end up living someone else’s life.”
“Really?”
“One day you won’t recognize yourself in the mirror. I guarantee it. One day you’ll wake up and your face—alien territory.”
“Whose did you want to live?”
“Mine!”
“So wait, I’m still confused, whose did you live?”
“Don’t you listen?”
I opened one of Henry’s windows. Rain was falling now in invisible streaks. You had to squint to see it. It’s strange to look at a street you know so well from a different angle. Here was a street I’d grown up on, walked up and down my whole life. I could never get used to the view from up there. It wasn’t the place I knew. The wet September street, the empty sidewalk, the few cars passing, and the sounds they made, rain quishing beneath tires. It’s so simple, I thought, even I could figure it out. St. Johns Avenue goes on without you.
Henry lying on his bed. His enemy tsking, gloating. I asked him again, would he mind giving me a little more time? Alone?
He stood. “You have nine hours until rigor mortis.”
“He was an intellectual,” I said.
The man nodded and, with his TV, did a little shuffle of a dance out of the room.
Not a shred of the old building remains. Where it once stood, there are three new houses, basketball hoops in the empty driveways. It was an old-age home for retired employees of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. Such places used to exist around Chicago. The home looked like a kind of Greek temple, with a set of huge pillars in front. To walk those steps was like arriving somewhere. But at the same time vines crawled all over the front, as if even then the building knew it didn’t belong in the neighborhood and was trying to camouflage itself. People seemed to notice it only after they started to tear it down. Before the railroad bought the place, sometime in the twenties, it
had been a convent. When it changed over, some of the old nuns stayed on to care for the railroad men. Henry used to wonder out loud where all the young nuns went, if there were ever any young nuns. He said he sometimes roamed the halls looking for virgin ghosts to violate. He never once mentioned trains. He’d been a conductor on the Chicago/Kenosha line for fifty-odd years. I visited him on Tuesdays, sometimes Thursdays. I sat on the edge of the bed. Henry’s wet eyes were still open. His enemy poked his head back in.
“A cavalry of habits is on the way. Someone else must have heard you yelling and pressed a button. God forbid anybody gets out of bed around here.”
“All right,” I said.
“What’d you do? Drugs?”
“Stole.”
“How many hours?”
“Hundred.”
“What are you up to?”
“Passed it. Court signed off.”
“Ah, a saint.”