by Peter Orner
“I was married for two weeks.”
“Two weeks?”
“Felt like a hell of a long time. At the end of the second week—we were still on our honeymoon in Ireland—he turned to me and said, ‘Well?’ And I said, ‘Well, what?’ For the life of the man he couldn’t think of anything else to say.”
Reverend Hrncirik couldn’t either. He gaped at her.
“And it didn’t rain in Ireland. The entire time I kept waiting. You never married?”
12/14/63
My dear Reverend Hrncirik,
Don’t think I have forgotten the happy days I spent in Brno. I’m sending along to you Alan Paton’s second novel. I wouldn’t say that it is as groundbreaking as the first; nonetheless, Paton continues to expose. This one is about a delicious creature called the Immorality Act, which prohibits contact of a carnal nature between the races. Contact of a carnal nature! Can you imagine the bureaucrat that came up with that particular phraseology?
The book is a paperback. On the front it says, “For the considerable audience that hailed Cry, the Beloved Country as a literary and popular masterpiece, Alan Paton has produced another novel of similar beauty, equal power, and even greater readability—The Denver Post.” Denver! Americans! Even their books are advertisements. To be barked at like that while you are trying to read. This one is called Too Late the Phalarope. He looks up phalarope in his English dictionary: Kinds of small, wading and swimming birds known for their timidity. He lays the book aside and straightens some papers on his desk. He’d planned to write some letters and to finish a report before Barbara Hoffman returned. And make no mistake, a letter is a return. Three sentences of one letter and the salutation of another—he crumples both. He picks up hers again and rubs the tissue-thin paper between his fingers. He raises it to his nose as if it might carry her scent. It smells faintly of dust. They’d gotten to talking about books. She’d loaned him one she’d just finished, a book with such a beautiful title, Barbara Hoffman had said, it made her want to plant it in a garden. He’d read Cry, the Beloved Country in one sleepless night, in a fever. In a bleary—and theatrical—moment at 4 a.m., he’d knelt and kissed the book. How else to honor such a man, such a pastor, as this black Father Kumalo? Reverend Hrncirik had been so shamed that the next day he’d jibbered at Barbara Hoffman… “Unless all the churches, mine, the Episcopalians, my Lord, even the Catholics, everybody, regain consciousness”—He’d stopped himself and slapped the book on the table. “Ah, but what’s the incentive for this? Churches sleep now, as we slept before. Ask your rabbis in Prague. For every Bonhoeffer there’s a thousand men like me.” He gazed around his tiny office, but he was really looking beyond it, at the crumbling altar of his church, at the weary streets of his city, at his people walking, bundled.
He talked on, ignoring her protests. “And this Father Kumalo? He’s enough to make you abandon forgiveness as any sort of answer. When you see it only twisted, increasing paralysis. They heap tribulation. He forgives. They heap. He forgives. It isn’t supposed to work like this.”
“An old story,” Barbara Hoffman said.
Reverend Hrncirik laughed. “But remember, even Christ chased away the moneychangers. That old man? He’s almost monstrous in his patience. No anger, only love, as his son hangs.”
“What are you suggesting, Reverend?”
“I don’t know.”
“That forgiveness doesn’t always work?”
“Keep it between us.”
Barbara Hoffman laughed with her eyes. “In this sense, I agree with you. Perhaps the only answer in a place like South Africa is brute force.” She paused. “But—the West, with our obsession with Communism. We only have the capacity to understand one evil at a time. Besides, the South Africans are such good capitalists.”
Ah, Communism! He smiled and wrapped his throat with both hands, mock strangling.
Now Barbara Hoffman didn’t laugh. She only looked at him, Why haven’t you touched me, Reverend Hrncirik? Why haven’t you reached across your desk and touched me?
They both listened to the rain.
I heard Paton speak in Belgium in November. He said he had little hope for a peaceful solution in South Africa. Perhaps he is coming around to facing the inevitable. You may have heard that after his last trip abroad, his passport was seized by his government and he is no longer permitted to leave the country. A quiet man, but a powerful one. Please tell me all your news and if you received the promised shipments…
On the evening of her last day she’d asked him to her hotel room for some chocolate. “Swiss.” She laughed. “I smuggled it over the border.” And he declined with a bow, making it clear there was nothing wrong with the invitation in an academic sense—it wasn’t as though he was celibate, he’d had other women over the years—but he wouldn’t accept her offer, anyway. What was it he wanted to punish her for? For being as lonely as he was? He remembers feeling simply tired, or rather, he remembers that he had an expectation of being tired later. I’m exhaustible, he thought. I am a man whom things exhaust before they’ve even happened.
Now, this afternoon, he thinks, I could have listened to her voice. I could have just watched her lips move. He was a man who nursed all the proper notions, beginning with his bedrock belief that to restrict belief is to oppress God and that such blasphemy is fathomless. But his actions, his actions, amounted to begging help from plumbers and electricians. He thinks of Father Kumalo hiking up the mountain, that old man feeling his way in the dark with a stick. There are no small heroes. He looks around his office at the stacks of requisition forms, at the old bronze clock, at one of his gloves lying on the floor. He exists. This church exists. Will it ever be enough? He drums his fingers on the book. Who’s the timid bird? He thinks of the uselessness of being a man people don’t want to even silence, much less kill. He laughs at how beyond him it all is. A man without the courage to love, where would he find the courage to stand up. Against what? A shadow darkens the cloudy glass of his door window. Slowly, like a much older man than he is, he rises. His parishioners always lurk like that. Always, they hover in the corridor. Why won’t they knock? He sits back down. He won’t open it. Wait, whoever you are, wait. Let you wait. Let the old widows wait. Let the man from Pardubice with the sick daughter wait. Let Jesus himself wait. Reverend Hrncirik slumps in his chair, allows her image to tunnel into his stomach, sink down his legs. He’d gone back to his room that night and masturbated slowly, with the light on. He fingers the soiled handkerchief in his pocket and wants to do it again now, even almost gently, like he did that night. But not with that impatience at the door, not with this book on the desk, not with her letter silently—what? Asking? Goading? Forgiving?
Call these the meditations of an overweight junior lifeguard watching an empty lake, up in this chair lording over nobody. The last swimmer gave it up hours ago, late-afternoon September, the day gray and lingering. The lake is nearly motionless. The waves curdle up the shore like frosting. I think of what it might be like to actually have something to do. Guard, my child. Oh, guard, my daughter, oh, guard, do something, do something–and so, stiffen the sinews, summon the blood, dishonor not my mother. Into the breach I catapult, out past the buoys designating the authorized swimming area, and execute the Lost Buddy Drill, except this time there’s a body. I dive down, down, counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and I feel my way in the dark water, across the smooth, scalloped bottom of the lake, and search for an obstruction, the soft inert peacefulness of the drowned. Come up, breathe. Do it again. Count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and all I want is to feel flesh, all I want is to break the surface with the booty, haul in the girl alive–alert the media–as people, my people, watch from the beach. Hail the chubby Adonis. No one will drown on his watch. This job–and how much else?–is one long unrescue. I’m in charge of the blind sand, of the lake, my lake, now churning, now seething, as the wind picks up, as the gray day lingers.
MILLARD’S BEACH, 1986
WAUKEGAN STORY
S
he completed the forms and submitted them, along with a thick sheaf of notarized documentation. Long hours of doing what she had always done followed. Days of the same. Work: cleaning, cooking, marketing, washing, reading, teaching, correcting, preparing lessons. But really what Maritsa was doing was waiting, so even what was the same took longer now. One day she burned her maps in the oven, watched them ignite through the greasy little window. Still, she was waiting. Then the idea of hoping (because what is hoping if it isn’t waiting?) became so abruptly foreign it scared her. She didn’t need it anymore. The embassy of the United States had sent her a stamped paper.
Maritsa used to place her hands over America. Even with her fingers spread, she couldn’t cover it all. Michigan’s flat hat, Florida’s backward chicken leg. California always longer than her own thumb.
She took her seven-year-old, Damyan, and renamed him Danny, although she insisted that his name would always be Damyan. He didn’t mind. SWAT teams and Chicago Bears, the boy couldn’t get enough. Her husband, Lyubomir, stayed behind in Sophia. He was a doctor and he had to close his affairs as well as transfer their tiny, despised flat. Of course, he wasn’t going to be a doctor any more than she was going to be the schoolteacher she had spent the last twelve years of her life waking up and being. And what are they going to think of me there, my English being so atrocious? They’ll think I’m illiterate, a moron.
“And Damyan? You’ll steal his chance?”
“Don’t hide behind the boy. It’s you—”
So she left Lyubomir, and for months, the two of them sent letters back and forth across the ocean. In one letter, his pen ripped through the paper. He wrote that he had become a man with a wife who insisted the only way to leave a flat she hated was to move to America! Maritsa replied: It isn’t the flat, it’s everything. It’s the neighbors, it’s the Dancescus flushing, it’s the snoring, it’s Razvan and Sabina’s fucking we have to listen to. Can’t you understand that people shouldn’t have to live like this—especially now? And always, Damyan. The unimaginable opportunity. Damyan the American! What lies! And I’m a man who let it happen! They laugh at me, don’t you see, Maritsa? They’re all laughing.
And some nights he’d wake her up just before dawn, a call they couldn’t afford, and pant into the phone like an exhausted horse.
When she felt confident enough with her spoken English (she’d studied it for years, but talking to Americans was another matter altogether), she finally told the kind, stubby-fingered man at the gas station grocery who she was and what she was doing here. He spat laughter, not cruelly, only in shock: A refugee? To Waukegan? This armpit? Come on, love, sell me something else.
Well, not a refugee in a technical sense, but she didn’t want to explain her classification and the label made it easier. She’d won a lottery and the INS placement office in Washington, D.C., had found her an apartment in what was left of this city on Lake Michigan, too far from Chicago to say she lived in Chicago.
She got a job with a maid service. Every morning she and three other women were driven in a van to clean houses in Lake Forest. Lake Forest! Now here was America! Her first morning in the van, another girl, a Jamaican, had nudged her and said, “You won’t believe me.”
“What?”
“The women, they clean the houses before we get there.”
“What?”
“Not a joke. They clean like lunatics, these women. Oh, you’ll scrub their crap inside the toilet bowls, yes, and worse, but a lot of the work is already done before you walk in the house with the bucket.”
Cleaning for the cleaning ladies. Maritsa found this preposterous lie to be absolutely true. So it wasn’t the work that was difficult. It was only that these houses, houses as big as banks she roamed around with her tank-sized vacuum cleaner, sapped her energy in other, less definable ways. It was a kind of fatigue. She’d never imagined that proximity to wealth, unfathomable wealth, could make her so weary. She found herself not even wanting it anymore.
English classes were held Tuesday and Thursday nights at the local grammar school. She sat squeezed, her knees jammed against the bottom of a tiny desk, and repeated after the teacher, whose name was Gilda Petrocelli. Not Mrs. Petrocelli or even Mrs. Gilda, only Gilda, and she had fat pink cheeks that made her look like a talking porcelain doll. She also had a husband who kept constant watch, prowling outside class, stalking the little halls like a giant in squeaky shoes. Often Gilda’s husband stuck his face in the narrow, crisscrossed wire window and breathed until it fogged. It was hard to tell if the husband’s problem was anger or sorrow or fear. Gilda had told the class that before she began teaching Advanced ESL, she’d been a librarian. But that’s all in the past now, she said. She said it like all that cataloging and shelving had been like fighting in some forgotten war. And maybe it had been. Teaching school had certainly been like that. Those terrible dangling feet, every morning those pairs of relentlessly staring eyes. Gilda was particularly concerned about pronunciation. She always spent the last five minutes simply saying whatever words came to her, in alphabetical order. Pronunciation holds the key, she’d say, grinning and holding up a cardboard cutout with a drawing of an old-fashioned skate key, to successful integration. These are words you know, but you must master how they sound. She spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable, directing them to watch her mouth.
Appetite. Butcher. Curriculum. Despondent. Evaporate.
At night she’d coo to her sleeping Damyan, but really more to herself, that where you are is in your mind, that it’s got nothing to do with maps. That if you aren’t in Waukegan in your mind, you aren’t there. Do you hear me, little man? This isn’t Waukegan, it’s the Horn of Plenty…
October and she’d walk the wet streets to the gas station grocery for sliced cheese and a magazine. She’d look at the potholes full of oily water and the broken windows of the abandoned paint factory that stretched three city blocks. The buildings of Sophia were beautiful in their corruption; headless, handless statues gazed down from countless ledges. Her city was streets of crumble and scaffolds. True, there were newer buildings in Sophia, cheap flimsy apartment blocks built in a day and a half, like the box she’d moved into after she got married, but she didn’t think of these when she thought of the architecture of home. In Waukegan, the buildings were not new and not old, and no one bothered to say anything about them one way or the other. They’d been built to endure and then were just left.
The man at the gas station told her that the big boats still call at Waukegan, but not as many as used to. Afternoons, after work, and before Damyan got home from school, she’d walk down to the beach by the harbor. She’d listen to the halyards clack against the masts of the sailboats not yet taken ashore for winter. But she didn’t come to look at the boats, small ones or big ones. She’d go down there to watch the waves, white as they crushed into shore, yellow as they withdrew. Plastic detergent bottles bobbed in with the current and bobbed out again.
Always, Maritsa would tell herself, the first betrayal, leaving, will always be the worst. She was confused by her own choices and her own desires, and she’d look out the windows of the houses she cleaned, at the enormous leafless trees, trees that took almost all the space of the sky, and curse herself for not knowing what to dream. Is this an answer? A husband panting into the phone? Days wandering rooms of other people’s piles of things?
Damyan looked so unlike his father that people in their building used to whisper that someone else must have been parking in her garage. She’d been called a whore behind her back so many times that for years she’d felt like one. Honorary whore of a building that apparently needed one. Damyan was a pale, oval-headed boy, with little hair and large, fearlessly unblinking eyes. He wasn’t afraid to look at anybody, and often adults were put in the uncomfortable position of having to turn away from a child’s stare. He had all his father’s curiosity and none of his mother’s restlessness. What’s the difference between snot and saliva? Why do people say you can drink one and not the o
ther? They’re both only secretions. I’ve tried snot and it’s possible, you can drink as much as you want. His father’s boy, already exasperating teachers on a new continent. He was also a courageous kid and knew he had to buck up for his mother in a place that wasn’t so much unkind to her as ambivalent. His mother had always been a woman people talked about, and not only because she’d always been the prettiest. Now, here in Waukegan, no one much noticed her, and that shamed him. He tried not to let her know. He kept silent. And some nights she’d sit on the floor of his room and rest her head against his mattress and ask, Is it Daddy? No. Is it home? No. Why won’t you tell me? The boy would dig his face into his pillow and feign sleep.
The second betrayal was named Ted. He was from Pakistan. His name wasn’t Ted any more than Damyan’s was Danny. I’m Ted, he’d said, Ted tired of correcting people. She almost laughed. “That’s not funny,” she said. How long since she’d laughed? A ten-minute break during class, the two of them leaning against a set of little lockers. He’d looked at her then from an odd angle, his head too far to the left. He looked at her as if he already knew her weaknesses and was mocking her for bothering to try to hide them. He spoke English; he only pretended he didn’t. “It’s my second language,” he said, “but don’t tell anybody that we speak English in Pakistan, I’m here for dates. Night school ESL is the United Nations of Women. Filipinos, Mexicans, Koreans, Somalis, where did you say you were from again?” All this she laughed at, quietly, the way she remembered laughing as a child at things she knew she wasn’t supposed to, pressing her fingers into her lips. She thought it wouldn’t be right to ask his real name, that it would somehow break the grip he was already beginning to have on her. He would always be Ted, even after he was gone, and he had smooth lips that she knew would soon kiss her places Lyubomir couldn’t have imagined.