by Peter Orner
He stepped toward the bed and grabbed hold of one of Henry’s big toes. I made a move to stop him, but seeing it was done out of some kind of affection, I let it go.
PLAZA REVOLUCIÓN, MEXICO CITY, 6 A.M.
A woman who sells television antennas in the Zócalo walks slowly through a mostly empty plaza as the sun begins to rise and thinks of her sister who lives in Ohio now. Her sister who was beautiful before she had children. Teresa never had children herself. She and Reuben tried for years. But nobody called her beautiful to begin with. Why all this again now? The light, something about the changing light. As if a sheet were slowly being lifted off the crust of the earth. She crosses the plaza and thinks of a sleeping face, some lost morning. Her sister’s name is Rosella, a name Rosella always said she hated though it went so well with her beauty. She’s not lost, she’s in a place called Dayton.
The light slants across the plaza, slightly pinkish now. The four-sided arch looms. It’s really an unfinished building they call an arch. They started to build a new parliament here, but the land was too marshy, and so they had to stop. Didn’t they take off your shoes before they started to build? Maybe politicians who build parliaments never take off their shoes. But aren’t all buildings, like people, unfinished? We build and we build and still we’re not done? I know where to find Rosella and still she’s gone? It’s a question for God, who looms above this arch as indifferent to sisters as he is to parliaments, as he seems to be about so many other things. When they were girls, Rosella once slammed her on the nose with the bottom of a teapot. Teresa forgave her sister the same afternoon. She forgives her again this morning. For the teapot. For not being beautiful anymore. For being so far away she might as well not exist. Rosella. From her eyes not from her mouth in the now noisier morning.
HORACE AND JOSEPHINE
My aunt Josephine would slip fifty-dollar bills into the front shirt pocket of my brother’s Cub Scouts uniform. Go and buy yourself something nice for a damsel, soldier. Then she’d put one of her long, exquisite fingers to her lips to let my brother know that her secret of General Grant should stay between them. And even after Uncle Horace was completely disgraced and they were living in Aunt Molly’s spare room, Aunt Josephine still did that with the fifties. Because she walked around Aunt Molly’s cramped little stucco house on Wampanoag Street the same way she did her marble-floored palace way up at the top of the hill on Highland Avenue. With aplomb and grace. The fact that Horace had gone pauper didn’t change her. Or the paintings that now hung on Aunt Molly’s walls, the paintings Josephine had hid for months in my grandmother’s attic in order to save them from the public auction.
To Josephine, the paintings, one of which she claimed was an early Matisse (a whispy nude), represented who she was, not who she once was. True, they no longer adorned a grand front hall like the one she used to hustle guests through with a flurry of wild waving: Don’t dawdle, come in, come in! Come in! Yet even exiled at Molly’s, Aunt Josephine’s eyes gave nothing away. Not regret, never anger. Uncle Horace had a similar take. His spectacular plunge from the upper stratosphere of Fall River society didn’t stop him from hectoring anyone who came near him about the glories of high finance. That he’d been brought so low was proof that he’d been a true gambler, the sort of visionary American who built this country. You think John D. Rockefeller didn’t take any risks with other people’s money? This whole damn country is built on other people’s money.
By the mid-seventies it was well known throughout southeastern Massachusetts and all of Rhode Island—even the Providence Journal got into the act and put it on the front page—that Horace’s sham investment scheme, his robbing of Peter to pay Paul, as my mother put it years later, had not only bankrupted him, but nearly took the rest of the family—and much of Jewish Fall River—down as well. After decades of Horace paying 8 or 9 percent monthly interest, all his investors lost their principal when the whole thing went bust. They say nobody in the family came out unscathed when it came down to the accounting, except, as my grandmother used to mutter under her breath, Aunt Pauline’s husband, Ira, because Ira Pinkus, the lousy foot dragger, had never earned an honest dollar to begin with and knew a con when he saw one.
Horace and Josephine were our family’s famous once-hads. Horace Ginsburg was the son of an upholsterer who’d taken his father’s tailor shop and built an investment corporation with subsidiaries in five states. We used to make clothes, now all we make is money! So what if it was all a snow job, a paper swindle? A man of business is measured in this world by what it looks like he’s got, forget the actualities. And for years, in addition to the house on Highland Avenue, Horace and Josephine did, it seemed, have a Manhattan condo on East Seventy-Seventh and a beach house on the Cape at Dennis and a pied-à-terre in Nassau. What about his front-row season tickets to Harvard football? Horace didn’t go to Harvard. But what’s it matter, he used to sing, if Harvard’s not my alma matter? I give them wads, wads. Once, Uncle Horace said to my brother, You know what the secret of philanthropy is? Never give a single dime to anybody who needs it. And, of course, he had Josephine Sharkansky, the most ravishing and cosmopolitan girl of Hebrew extraction ever to grace the muddy banks of the Taunton River. They had it all, so it’s no wonder people shoveled their money at Horace. People wanted to talk about the things that Horace and Josephine talked about, modern art, Carl Jung, Nehru; travel to the places they traveled to, Saint-Tropez, Copenhagen, Nairobi. Everyone, even my never stylish, always frumpled grandparents, wanted a piece of that action.
Even after it was all out in the open, Horace and Josephine held tight to their mystique by tossing an enormous costume ball in the waning days before the auction. If we’re going to fail, Josephine must have told Horace, let’s do it grandly, loudly, with abandon, my puckery darling. Horace went as a conquistador; Josephine as Golda Meir, who, she noted, was a librarian before she became a prime minister. We lunched with her in Tel Aviv. Extraordinary woman, marvelous sense of irony…
I came along a lot later. Long after Horace and Josephine’s glory days had been reduced to stacks of overexposed photographs stuffed in envelopes and pushed to the back of lower desk drawers lined with tissue-thin white paper. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, my family’s standard of living had long since plummeted, and the house on the Cape at Dennis was a sun-glared, overexposed memory. There were other disasters: The state built an interstate smack through my grandfather’s furniture store; Uncle Charlie’s cookie business went belly-up because of the price of sugar, something to do with a coup d’état in the Dominican Republic. In the late seventies, my humbled relatives summered in the Fall River swelt.
But as a nine-year-old so shy I only stared at the stains in Aunt Molly’s carpet, even I understood there was something different about visiting this house. When we went to see Horace and Josephine, we were treated like dignitaries from the far-off Midwest. In the summer of 1976, Josephine greeted us in front of Molly’s squeaky screen door and announced: “Nephews, I’ve made pâté.” We settled in the small front room crowded with furniture and sipped tea. I’m sure it was the first time in my life I had ever used a saucer. Aunt Josephine conversed with us. My grandmother’s army of other sisters didn’t so much talk as force-feed. Plates of brownies would materialize, one after the other. They’d been baking nonstop for months. Josephine crossed her legs and asked what we thought of Andy Warhol. Didn’t we think his significance somewhat overstated? After stammering and sipping our tea, we were released to Horace, who was waiting in the spare bedroom with his pipe. We took turns kissing his fuzzled face. He was sitting in the only chair. He motioned us to sit on the bed. A gnarled man, he seemed to shrink every summer. He stood, clapped his hands, and sputtered smoke into my brother’s face.
“A peanut-butter salesman?” he shouted. “Truman hawked hats, but haberdashery is at least a profession.”
“Jimmy Carter is a businessman farmer,” my brother intoned, brushing hair out of his eyes. He’
d been practicing for months to talk political shop with Uncle Horace, the only known Republican in the family. “His peanut operation is a major agricultural concern. He also served his country aboard a nuclear submarine. He’s been governor of the thirty-first largest state. He knows what he’s doing, frankly—injecting a little decency into our morally bankrupt society.”
“A ten-year-old Maoist!” Horace shouted. “God save us!”
“I’m fifteen,” my brother said.
“Listen, boy, capitalists may be dogs, but we’re the only dogs that hunt, and if you think that psalm-singing son of a bitch—”
At this, Josephine scurried into the den. “Shush.” She reminded him that we were still only kids. “Lovey, remember, the sky has yet to fall on their heads.”
“They should keep looking up,” Horace said.
Yet she calmed him. They could take it all away—every cent, the houses, the honorary degrees, and the lifetime community service medallion from the Fall River Chamber of Commerce. They could put all his heirlooms on the front lawn and he could stand there and watch while the auctioneer yodeled and the neighbors hauled off the family silver for a song, but he was still married to Josephine Sharkansky and you could see that in his watery eyes when she came to rescue my brother. Josephine, with her long blue-gray hair pulled tightly around her head, poured another round of tea into our delicate cups. My grandmother, who had been hovering in the kitchen throughout the visit, clattering pots and reorganizing drawers, emerged and said under her breath, “Jo, how can you serve children tea in the good china?”
Josephine looked at my grandmother. She’d only ever been beautiful to Horace. There was something too perfectly oval, maybe, about her face. She was called by men and by women handsome. She said to her sister, “Do you remember tea in the gazebo on Highland Avenue?”
Horace and Josephine often apologized to my brother and me for not being rich anymore. Josephine would say things like: “Oh, lambs, if things hadn’t gone to the absolute dogs, we’d all be on the Cape right now and you two would be splashing in the bay like a couple of little John-Johns.” As a consolation, they would take us to Horseneck Beach on Buzzards Bay. I remember one time we were pulling into the parking lot on one of those blazy gusty days, the waves a fluster of rising white gush, and Josephine turned to Horace and said, “Oh, Mr. Onassis. You’re always taking me places. Today, the South of France.”
Years later, when I was a freshman in high school and my brother was already away at college, I remember standing in the little kitchen on Wampanoag Street, talking to Josephine. She wanted to know what sort of education I was receiving at public school. She thought it scandalous that I hadn’t yet read The Charterhouse of Parma. How could a boy your age not be exposed to the passionate antics of Fabrizio? Horace had been skulking around, ignoring us. Talk of anything other than politics or business irritated him; he was lonely for my brother. I watched him stoop to pick something up off the kitchen floor. He tickled Josephine’s ankle with a couple of stubby, unsteady fingers. She reached down and, without taking her eyes off me, swatted. Horace muttered and withdrew like a shooed-away crab.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought it was a crawly.”
But they couldn’t carry on like that forever, and Horace, who was seven years older, eventually got sick. No one in our family ever says what anyone is sick with, sick is sick. Whatever it was, it soon became too serious for Josephine. Aunt Molly had died by this time. So they moved Horace to the Jewish Home for the Aged out on Warren Avenue. And though he never did get much better, Horace didn’t die right away, either. He lingered for years. Whenever I visited Fall River, my grandmother would conspire to keep me busy seeing other relatives, but I overheard things because she was a terrible whisperer. Once, she hid in the bathroom. The phone cord was stretched across the hall and ran under the door. Still, she practically shouted. “I don’t know, Haddy. Last Tuesday he stopped eating.” Then Josephine fell down on the icy sidewalk in front of Molly’s. They ran tests. Again, nobody talked, but we knew it was bad and that it went beyond a broken hip. My grandmother couldn’t get Josephine a bed in the Jewish Home, even though Horace’s money had put a new wing on the place back in his salad days. Ginsburg was chiseled above the front door. My grandmother stomped around the house. “Waiting list? Our Josephine on a waiting list?” She sat at the kitchen table with the phone book. “I’m going to make some calls.” I watched her finger in the rotary, poised to circle. She rammed the phone down.
“Damnit, if he didn’t steal from the father, he stole from the son.”
“What about Uncle Ira?” I said.
My grandmother stood up. Even in her sweat suit, she was square-shouldered, bulky, formidable. My grandfather had so many names for her: La Duce, Generalissima Patton. My grandfather’d been dead at least ten years by then.
“Ira Pinkus?” my grandmother said. “May we never sink so low.”
She sat down again and stared at the phone book. Horace needed special medical care and couldn’t be moved from the Jewish Home. Josephine clearly couldn’t live alone. My grandmother was stretched too thin driving around caring for Uncle Charlie and Aunt Haddy, both of whom could hardly walk, not to mention Ida in Providence with her kidney trouble and Pauline with her nerves and dizzy spells. And everybody, old and young, was too broke and too busy. There was no choice but to put Josephine in the state home across the river in Somerset. “It’s close enough,” my grandmother said. “Just across the Braga Bridge.”
My brother told me this last part as we stood blowing into our hands at Josephine’s graveside service in the late 1990s. He said not to repeat it. He got it from my mother, who told him not to tell anybody. She’d heard it from my grandmother who’d told her, before she herself died, not to breathe a word to a soul. Stories move across my family in this efficient way. My brother said that a week before Horace’s death, a year and a half before Josephine’s, two of my cousins, Monroe, Horace and Josephine’s only child, and Hannah, Ida’s daughter, arranged for Horace and Josephine to say good-bye. At this point, Horace was blind and mostly slept all day, but Monroe smuggled him into a car—this was all against strict doctor’s orders, so it had to be done undercover—and drove him to a shopping center between the two nursing homes. Hannah delivered Aunt Josephine, who by then had lost nearly half her body weight. Horace and Josephine hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years. The family had been waiting for one or the other to die quietly, but neither would cooperate. He was ninety-five. She was eighty-eight. The two cars pulled up, and there they were, Horace and Josephine, in the parking lot of Al Mac’s. Josephine was able to stand up and walk slowly over to Horace, who was slumped in the passenger seat. Monroe opened the door and started to help him, but Horace pushed him away. He knew she was close and tried to pull himself out of the seat, but couldn’t; so Josephine leaned into the car, and Horace dropped his head on her shoulder. Then she whispered something to him. Neither of my cousins heard what she said. Maybe she told him she’d meet him wherever he was going and not to worry, they’d be flush when they got there. Meet me by the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo, at Beaumont’s. I’ll be the one in the fox coat and white heels. The two of them remained slumped over each other until my cousins finally broke them apart and drove them away in separate cars.
I was six, maybe seven months old, and I had a babysitter named Eva. She was from somewhere in the West Indies and spoke with, my parents always said, the most charming singsong accent you could imagine. My father called her the governess. That night my parents were at the opera. It was February. This is when we lived on Lincoln and Webster, near Oz Park. The heat went out in our building and it got so cold that Eva wrapped me in a towel and put me in the oven. My parents came home from Rigoletto and found Eva jumping in place in the kitchen. On her head was a large furry Russianish hat of my father’s. My mother, essentially unalarmable in any circumstances, didn’t scream when she realized what was in the oven, though at first she wa
sn’t entirely sure what she was seeing. My father, too, he just took it in. He may have been equally astonished that the governess was wearing his favorite hat. Me? Nobody asked, but had I been able to talk I would have said I was comfortable as hell and that my removal from this new womb was as unwelcome as my previous abduction from the original. Eva had the right idea. The minute I get settled you people come and yank me out–
CHICAGO, 1969
PAMPKIN’S LAMENT
Two-term Governor Cheeky Al Thorstenson was so popular that year that his Democratic challenger could have been, my father said, Ricardo Montalban in his prime and it wouldn’t have made a 5 percent difference. Even so, somebody had to run, somebody always has to run, and so Mike Pampkin put his sacrificial head into the race, and my father, equally for no good reason other than somebody must prepare the lamb for the slaughter, got himself hired as campaign manager. Nobody understood it all better than Pampkin himself. He wore his defeat right there on his body, like one of the unflattering V-neck sweaters that made his breasts mound outward like a couple of sad little hills. When he forced himself to smile for photographers, Pampkin always looked slightly constipated. And he was so endearingly, down-homey honest about his chances that people loved him. Of course, not enough to vote for him. Still, for such an ungraceful man, he had long, elegant hands, Jackie O. hands, my father said, only Pampkin’s weren’t gloved. Mike Pampkin’s hands were unsheathed, out in the open for the world to see. He was the loneliest-seeming man ever to run for statewide office in Illinois.
It was 1980. I was a mostly ignored fourteen-year-old and I had already developed great disdain for politics. It bored me to hatred. But if I could have voted, I must say I would have voted for Cheeky Al also. His commercials were very good and I liked his belt buckles. Everybody liked Cheeky Al’s belt buckles.