Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

  They were so rich that in 1936, right in the midst of the trouble, they bought a larger house outside town and moved, against the children’s wishes. Orrin’s father explained that the move was for them—they needed more space to grow and they needed more of The Great Outdoors—but each-of them protested his premises. They loved the older house (all three had been born in it) and The Great Outdoors was right at the foot of Grand Avenue anyway, in the form of a limitless wetland, with bending birches and a swamp pond for ice-skating. Even beyond that lay a nine-hole golf course that only children used, for toad hunting, football, hide-and-seek. You didn’t have to own The Great Outdoors, explained Barney (who at thirteen was necessarily the spokesman), but their parents wanted to own it, so they all went.

  The new house never measured up. For one thing it was literally new and so lacked all the farmhouse fragrances; pantry suffused with the pleasant must of decades, basement of damp earth and worn softened duck-board. This basement was concrete and always smelled slightly sour; its walls were sheer gray, with no wood or earth visible anywhere. The children called it The Dungeon and they never went down into the “playroom” that had been a big part of What They Needed.

  The Grand Avenue house became Orrin’s paragon of comfort and home, yet he had never come close to duplicating it, having slid into a profession that called for urban trappings and having married a wife who preferred them as well. He never even got as far out as a suburb; it had been Providence, Baltimore and, for twenty years now, Boston. He had disembarked forty-nine years back and still there were occasions, like a storm and a power outage, that could summon up the very odors and textures of that undistinguished much-beloved manse.

  In those days the lights frequently went off for a few hours, summer and winter alike. People managed easily enough, since not much was plugged in, though a dependence on the radio was rapidly forming. Orrin’s mother kept their set babbling and scratching throughout her four-to-seven spate in the kitchen. It was the way of things that after working the exact same hours as Orrin’s father (in the same schoolhouse too, and after travelling home with him in the same car), Elizabeth Summers would then clean house, prepare the dinner, and tidy up afterward with help from the children.

  But only when there was a big blow, the late summer gales or a fourteen-inch snow-howler in January, would the lights stay out all night, all weekend, or all week twice or three times. Then they cooked their meals over a log fire—beans warmed right in the can, frankfurters on a crooked stick—and lit the evening’s reading with plumber’s candles, the stout white wax like a foundation under wind-wavering flames in the drafty kitchen. Elizabeth might play the piano, sometimes four hands with Orrin’s sister Jessica, in lieu of radio entertainment, and they would each take a turn at popping the corn. They were not an exuberant family, not one where humor ran high, but they would all loosen up and laugh wildly at the startling explosions of corn inside the covered pan. Popping the corn was an entertainment, and a treat, and to Orrin it was also emblematic of the house itself. It was the house that symbolized the rest for him: childhood innocence, family happiness, security.

  Scaling the hill now with candles and popping-corn in hand after the unlikely triumph of finding the Seven-Eleven open (bravely serving the community by Coleman lantern-light, even with their registers “down”), Orrin must have caught an odd slant of gaslight, because one second he was merely executing an errand and the very next he was experiencing a rush of physical joy—pure, airy, and unselfconscious. Almost delirious. His heart upswept in the bristling wind, it was as though he had reinhabited the soul of an eight-year-old.

  Wholly innocent of liquor, Orrin almost started skipping in the snow, wearing the heedless grin of the drunkard (or the happy child), brimming over with the riches of this world. But it was cold out. Head down now, ploughing through a rippling curtain of flailing ice, he was soon delighted to regain the selfsame portal he had so recently fled.

  He fashioned crude candelabra for the kitchen and the living room, soldering each candle with its own drippings to the saucers. Then he jiggled the flue, tested the draft with the wisp of smoke from a match, and set about laying his first Filbert Street fire. As he packed pages of the morning paper and stuffed them under chunks of wood on the grate, Orrin did feel a mighty distance from popcorn heaven, but at the same time determined to give it a good try. Simply to introduce the aroma of popcorn into the room would be gratifying. If he actually got that far he would happily give up the rest; read a chapter or two by candlelight and be sound asleep early. Power would be restored by morning, and white sun would glare handsomely off the frozen steppe.

  And then the telephone intruded quite shockingly into this pre-industrial quietude. Long dormant, all but forgotten—a fossil really—the device was unlikely to sound even without a crippling storm. To hear it intact, raging bells in the flickering dark, was actually scary, a show of black magic from Ma Bell, allegedly-moribund. Orrin was almost afraid to touch it, for at the very least it seemed an omen, heralding bad news.

  “Orrin, I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “Eli! My God you gave me a fright.”

  “I did?”

  “The phone, I mean. You do know it’s a blackout? And so incredibly silent here, I was lost in my own thoughts so completely …”

  “Well I’m just checking because people are stranded here and there. I tried a while ago and I called your office, too.”

  “I appreciate the concern, but all’s well. I had cancellations and came home early. It’s kind of exciting in a way, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I’m stuck at the office myself. A couple of us are just going to sleep here, on the couches.”

  “Do you have a supply of coffee, and some food?”

  “Believe it or not the restaurant downstairs is open. The lights aren’t gone yet and we just finished a meal there. It’s more that the busses and trains have stopped, so we voted what the hell. I wasn’t too tempted to start off on my bike in this.”

  “Too bad for you, Eli, you are missing a real treat. I’m making a batch of popcorn.”

  “I thought you said the power was off—”

  “In the fireplace. It works. Although I’m afraid I had to feed your little chair to it to build the fire up. Hope you don’t mind …”

  “I hope you are kidding. I better not say keep the home fires burning. But why don’t you give it those cartons full of paper in the back hall instead?”

  “My life’s work! Listen, Eli, thanks for calling. I’m glad you’re settled nicely over there.”

  Orrin had given up hope of getting the chunks to do anything but sizzle, wet and black, and had begun to wonder which of Eli’s associates were stranded in the office with him (“too sexy for mere sex,” he had described one of the women) when the phone went off again. Paperman had started a trend.

  “So you’re good there?” said Clyde.

  “No problems at all. You?”

  “We’re fine. They actually got us back on somehow. Can you imagine going out in this weather to repair power lines?”

  “Well Clydie, you and I don’t quite fit the mould but there are men with a hero mentality. Who like a chance to battle the elements, you know, high seas and raging fires.”

  “That’s right. Injustice, too. The moral equivalent of war.”

  “William James?”

  “Very good! It is a blessing to have a father who is as overeducated as I am. So you’re surviving?”

  “Better than that. Thriving. I had a lovely walk in the wind and now I’m back here making popcorn in the fireplace and reading by candlelight. Improving the occasion, as your grandmother used to say.”

  “You make it sound idyllic.”

  “It is, really. Don’t worry about me. But did you manage to check on your mother?”

  “I tracked her to Ellen Brody’s, where the two of them have improved the occasion by laying in a gallon of wine and two old Hitchcock tapes. And the wine
will work even if the VCR. doesn’t. So I guess everyone’s covered.”

  “And we’ll all get a day off tomorrow. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  So Clyde had called his mother first. Could Orrin feel so petty that he wished the reverse had been true? Could he, moreover, long to be curling up with Gail and the Hitchcock films and the wine, as they ought by rights to be doing?

  He could and yet decided (sweeping the cold soft paper-ash from the hearth and stowing the unpopped corn) that on balance he felt just fine, as advertised. He did not feel alone, or lonely. Indeed he considered the possibility that he might feel popular as these phonecalls kept rolling in. But no, popular was not the word for it. Orrin could in the end be quite precise: what he felt was alive again.

  “Not me,” Paperman was saying. “I try to steer clear of the freedom-of-speech freaks. I don’t want to end up defending the K.K.K. or the porn industry. Not my trip.”

  “No.”

  “Justice isn’t abstract to me, or even relative. It’s absolute, obvious, moral.”

  “But of course that’s fascist.”

  “Of course.”

  This was a morning on which Orrin accompanied Paperman on the dawn foray, all the way to the wharves where business was nearly concluded and back to Copley Square where it was just getting underway. Now they sat over plain rolls and coffee on Newbury Street because Paperman was up in arms about cholesterol after a fourteen egg week, and about nitrates after seven matching scoops of hash.

  “I’m not a health nut. I just like to portion out my poisons,” he explained.

  “I agree with you. Keep the body off balance so it won’t know how to deteriorate.”

  “I think it’s true, though. That’s why I’m so pleased to see you off the sauce.”

  “I have always been a moderate tippler, Eli, though you may have met me at the height of my thirst and taken a wrong impression. Spending the past week with you, for instance, I might conclude you were formed entirely of Hessian Eggs. But it was a passing moment in time, one turn of the crop so to speak.”

  “Rest your case. I’m certainly no reformer,” Eli grinned.

  “Getting back to free speech, though—you were about to say why you did take this particular case?”

  “Because it isn’t really free speech that’s at issue. Free speech provides the occasion, that’s all. Listen, why don’t you come to the courthouse if you like and eavesdrop. You can analyze the motivation of all the key players.”

  “Oh I can do that sight unseen, from this chair. You’ve got financial gain, the quest for personal power, and sexual self-promotion. And of course the over-riding desire to be loved in shameless comfort.”

  “The dim view, eh?”

  “Just so. But not you, Eli. Your motives stand apart.”

  “Go on. Do me, then.”

  “Dawn air, aluminum beer, and precise justice for all.”

  “You are some bullshitter, Orrin. You should have been a lawyer. But why don’t you come. You might find it interesting.”

  Something had changed in the relation between them and it had happened a week earlier, the night of the storm, though Orrin had not identified it until yesterday, in the office with Sue Roth. “If he would only call,” Sue had pleaded, not for the first time. “I know he’s busy. But he could still be a friend, be in touch. Is that so much to ask?”

  It was not so much to ask, Orrin allowed, yet was still too much, for this simple reason: either the man called or he did not. The matter was beyond her control, especially as she had made this point to her husband time and again without effect.

  Give up! That’s what Ann Landers would have told Roth, free of charge. But beyond the obvious (that one must be one’s own best provider) Orrin saw the momentous element of dumb luck in life.

  “He knows I am in agony from the migraines,” poor Sue continued spinning her wheels, “but by the time this man is out the door and in the car—what, ten seconds?—my head is healed. By then I don’t have a head, I don’t exist.”

  True, her husband might have been a habitual caller, a polite inquirer. With so little more, a brief even insincere toot of sympathy, his wife might be twice as happy. Maybe happy enough, although naturally she would have held different, higher standards had he been less of a shit-heel. Still there was luck involved and no one was invulnerable to the fallout, from good luck and bad—least of all Orrin himself.

  Rejected by Gail, stuffed and left staring at black curtainless windows, Orrin had become motionless on every level of his being. It did not have to happen, and yet once it had, he was stuck with it, defenseless. None of his training could avail him, nor could intellect, nor humor, though it helped, as did the few friends who would tolerate his heartfelt shenanigans.

  And then came Eli. He could take some credit for Eli, at least generically, but so much more was sheer luck, and timing. Like the business of Eli phoning in the night of the blackout—luck and timing. It was only a gesture of course, a mannerism as it were, yet wasn’t it also the call that Dick Roth never made to his wife? It was “nothing,” but like the sweet nothings a lover might whisper, it was everything as well. And the sheerest luck of it was manifest in the unlikelihood the phone would even function on such a wild night.

  Actually, Orrin’s luck had been running since Christmas. Optimism beset him. This was chemical change. Orrin, who knew the human emotions for a chemical laboratory, could hardly be surprised intellectually. He was surprised emotionally, though, because emotions never carry with them a sense of their own shelf-life, of what if anything might succeed them.

  He was seen by friends at The Club, by Barry and Beekman and Theo, as “coming around after a trying time,” so that he was again on good terms with them over restaurant lunches and afternoons at Clarendon Street. Orrin tacitly accepted their version and did not urge them to pay closer attention to his life or to their own. They were not allowing enough, he was nonetheless certain, for the element of dumb luck.

  9

  Having squealed like a second child all Fall for want of attention, Orrin now found himself turning away invitations. Offered the five-minute introductory to Lenke’s talk at The Hancock, he passed the little plum (and the handsome honorarium for keynoting) to Jack Beekman. When Clyde came up with tickets to a Wilde farce at The Colonial, Orrin invented prior commitments. Even for Jethro’s birthday, two weeks away, the best he could do was waver.

  There also came a chance to philander with a “great lady” (nominated to the post by Paperman), a divorcee who turned out in a footnote to be the very one who was too sexy for mere sex. Not ready, protested Orrin Summers, try me again in five or ten years.

  He was not so very busy technically, but he was working hard on Acknowledgement, among other things, and did not want to let a crowded social agenda bail him out. Better to defer re-entry, though he did accept from Eli a last-second invite to hear some Mendelssohn at the Davis Chamber Series in Cambridge.

  “Tia Adams was coming, but her boy has a hundred and two.”

  “Isn’t that my girlfriend, though? The Great Lady? I hope you aren’t moving in on me, Eli.”

  “Tia and I are strictly pals. But wait, does this mean you are lifting your five-year embargo?”

  “Not I. That’s just the bark of the dog in the manger you’re hearing. Anyway, I’m happy to fill in. I have never had an embargo on Mendelssohn.”

  So he went, and it proved another piece of pure luck. Because the night of cloud-smudged stars, the ornate old concert hall, and the playing were all just right—the venerable room like a wooden box full of melody, as high as it was deep and wide to form a perfect cube of music in which the phrasing of Mendelssohn’s charming violins ricocheted rich and clear. Orrin had not seen or admired in years the gracenotes that had always set the Davis apart, the rounds of carved plaster in the dome, elaborate marquetry inlays in the mahogany panels. The dated stage lighting was all the more defining for being dim and irregular, as players flared their hands and t
he planes of their faces in and out of shadow simply by bending to the flight and tumble of notes.

  “It does take you back in time,” said Orrin, as they stood in the buzzing open concourse, sipping coffee at intermission.

  “I never heard classical music as a child. In fact—I’m not sure I ever realized this before but my folks didn’t listen to music at all, of any kind. Isn’t that odd?”

  “It is, but I didn’t mean that. I meant historically. Back to the culture of Old Vienna, or evenings in Leipzig at the time of the Hapsburgs.”

  “Glory Days, sayeth The Boss. I don’t know from Hapsburgs but it’s a wonderful series and they perform well beyond my ability to criticize intelligently. I’m just a fan.”

  “Oh it’s beautifully played, Eli. I should phone friend Mia and thank her personally for dropping out.”

  “It’s Tia and you know it. Why not swing by with a tin of aspirin for Mickey and stay for her matchless blueberry upsidedown cake—which by the way is mine by rights.”

  “I expect she has some aspirin in the house.”

  “Prescribe something, then. Some potion. Hell, Orrin, I forget you’re a trained physician.”

  “So do I, it was all so long ago. Enough of your match-making joke, though—I can’t tell if I am in supply or demand. I’m just glad we have another hour of Mendelssohn coming to us. It may not be the most profound music but it is very good for the soul.”

  “It’s only Rock ’n Roll but I like it.”

  “Do you? Like rock-and-roll, that is?”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m afraid not. I was already pushing thirty when they had Elvis, you know. But I have a daughter—believe this if you can—who plays rock music professionally. If that’s the word.”