Postcards from Pinsk

by Larry Duberstein

  “Is she good?”

  “Who knows? I haven’t heard her sing a note in years. She’s part of a group, though I gather she is the lead singer.”

  “What’s the group?”

  “I don’t even know. Isn’t that terrible? I should find out, just so you can tell me if she is good.”

  Later, after the music, they strolled into Harvard Square and sat in a booth at the Wursthaus eating corned-beef sandwiches and sampling unlikely beers. Orrin’s brand hailed from Australia and tasted like six-months-in-a-can, so he left the bulk for Paperman the tang enthusiast and switched over to a Fudd’s Patella for himself.

  “A very mellow scene,” said Paperman.

  “You know, if they hadn’t driven that word from the English language it really would do, for this.”

  Orrin swept the room with his arm, but he meant to include the night as a whole: the blessed little February thaw, the sweetness of the Violin Concerto, the easy companionship. A happy night—simply that, and that simply, too simple to be spoken. There had been introduced into it, though, one minor nagging matter. How was it, how could it be, that he did not know the name of Elspeth’s singing group?

  True he did not know one bunch from the next and would likely care for none of them. If she worked at a school, however, as Clyde did, could he fail to know its name? If she was with a firm—business, law, whatever—he would surely know what that firm was called. How was this any different? Whose fault was it, whose doing? Orrin wondered how far back one would have to go for an answer, and summoned up Elspie at age eleven, her nose still stubby and her cheeks billowing like Dizzy Gillespie’s around the squeaking clarinet. Her navy-blue blazer with the yellow school insignia darned onto the pocket. And they celebrated the occasion over carte-blanche sundaes at Bailey’s and as a matter of fact Orrin recalled that Elspeth had ordered strawberry with strawberry sauce and jimmies. Was that a good father?

  He summoned her up again at sixteen, precisely sixteen, the night they took El and her best friend Rory to the Top of the Hub for flaming chateaubriand and a defiant white wine—because red was more “correct.” Rebellion! They joked about how school was stupid, boys were stupid, everything was stupid—except Orrin was still in the joke. An ally, then, at age sixteen.

  When had the curtain come down on him? She grew up, of course, he and Gail were bound to become peripheral; but when had they become an outright mortification, or worse, himself a nonentity? Never to see her face, never hear her voice (however good) not even to know the name of her singing group. His own daughter and he could not summon her up at twenty-six.

  With the Neffs one night, they had laughed out loud about the changes, recalling a time when young men and women were simply forbidden each other’s company in college dormitories. Years later came the stream of liberalization, beginning with a trickle: short visits on Sunday, with the door wide open and four feet on the floor. More than a decade later friends in the academic community alerted them to the next phase, the door a crack ajar and three feet on the floor. Was it a joke, the three feet? An invitation to the bizarre?

  It came as no surprise that the floodgates soon were loosed. In Clyde’s time at Dartmouth, your door was equipped with a lock, and what you chose to do with your feet or the feet of your friends was considered purely personal. Then Elspeth went and lived in a totally coeducational dorm, sharing a bathroom with seven men, like Snow White. It seemed so abandoned, so far beyond anyone’s control, that he and Gail had let it all go with a laugh. Better not to know, fruitless to keep asking, and then there was no longer any way to ask.…

  “You know,” he remarked to an uncomprehending Paperman, who was lavishly calling for dark ale from the Fiji Islands, “It never occurred to me the group might be good. I never even considered it an issue.”

  Eli kept on the move. He somehow managed to light down in Tarrytown, New York and Terre Haute, Indiana the same week, yet miss only one breakfast at The Paramount. Orrin, who had an agreeably irregular schedule himself, with more flexibility than most people, was stunned by Paperman’s unpredictability. Eli was always going on short notice because he could not, or would not, say no to anyone. It was hardly accidental Eli was a single man—no sane woman could plan a day around him, much less a life.

  As room-mates, though, he and Orrin had no need of plans and rarely made any. Procedure was to count heads at seven, then shop accordingly at the high-priced grocer on Charles Street. Then the scent of vegetables frying in oil, or the sizzle of breaded fish, to the strains of Bach or Schubert.

  “It’s cheaper, two people eating in,” Orrin joked one night, “than the same two eating out. I remember that from marriage.”

  “Like about a thousand percent cheaper. If only one of us could cook, we could be eating better too.”

  In truth, Eli had a flair in the kitchen and knew it. Orrin did prefer it when they could eat together. But if Eli was at large, Orrin could easily fall back on his own resources, newly expanded. Not just the work piled up on his desk in the study. He had resumed the custom of passing an hour or two at The Club, late afternoon to early evening. It trimmed the night down to a manageable size, and left him in a state of poise toward the world.

  (In an early paper, he had argued that this was the precise purpose of social life—the purely social contacts that cast no shadow on the snow—to provide this poise. It was a trick of physics achieving it, not one of psychology, for alone all day or constantly among people one could never achieve it, notwithstanding the riches of solitude or the capital assets of the crowd.)

  There was nothing tricky at The Club. One took one’s pleasures there as fortunate men always had: choice tobacco, good liquor, well-informed talk in ample armchairs with brass-tacked skins of leather. These same pleasures might exist in the home, pipe and slippers and a log on the fire, but they rarely had the same salubrious effect—hence The Club, throughout history. Late afternoon had been a good time for Orrin when the children were still at home, because it gave him a presence in the house, always home by six, yet braced him well for the chaos of it all.

  One dark rainy Tuesday, Orrin stopped at home to nudge the thermostat (The Weatherbaby had been frankly alarmed by cold air coming down from Canada) and was headed back out in scarf and hat when Eli came galloping up the stairs, as drenched as though he’d just been swimming in his clothes. Orrin, who had not expected Eli back before the weekend, smiled and helped to extricate him from the soggy coat.

  “Who was chasing you up the stairs?”

  “No racetrack but the night, no finish line but the dawn. How is everything, Orrin?”

  “Fine, very good. I like that line of yours.”

  “That line of Bob Dylan’s, actually.”

  “How was Los Angeles? Did you do all right?”

  “We got the injunction—that was the main thing. And I got to spend an hour with my brother. Otherwise I’m just plain tired.”

  “Tired! You ascended the stair like the original Greek lighting the original Olympic torch, with garlands of flowers round your head.”

  “Nice to know I make a good impression. But right about now a shower interests me more than a flower—a nice hot one and a familiar bed. Are you coming or going?”

  It made an interesting moment for Orrin. A complex moment. For he was going, all but gone, having just set his evening in motion. Now he was no longer in the mood for The Club, not of a mind to step out into the cold silverblack drizzle which Eli was so vividly pleased to have left behind. The hot shower and soft familiar bed, once enunciated, smacked of heaven precisely, plus of course he would not have been going in the first place had there been company at home.

  Still, he was going, and so felt obliged to keep going. To whom he owed this obligation, Orrin could not have said, as he was perfectly free to change his plan either with or without a small white lie. As it happened, calibrated by his reply, he was imperfectly free in fact.

  “Just going. Only for an hour, though. Maybe you’ll sti
ll be around when I get back.”

  It was nothing. Orrin only marked the occasion because it was the first small infelicity of luck or timing in memory. The previous day, to test it out, he had wished for sloppy weather (during his period of confinement at the office) and sleet came spinning from a lowery sky. Then, when he was set to go, he changed his order and almost at once the sweet melting rays of sun were flooding the streets. Orrin was on a major roll. Maybe it had been the same way with God, long ago, the week he said Let there be light.

  There was one setback the following week, a sort of lapse. Eli had been called straight back to L.A. and in his extended absence Orrin briefly let down his guard. It wasn’t easy taking a single drink at The Club, no one else did that, so this one time Orrin took two. A harmless indulgence, and certainly he arrived home sober.

  He went on to heat something inside a plastic pouch, some brackish noodles and gray meat with a vaguely continental moniker, and eventually settled back to glance at the News. When the talk turned to additional air from Canada (and yes, he was again sitting still for the Weather, if not seeking it out) Orrin had gone ahead and fortified himself against the elements with a short one.

  Jack-and-Liz were out sick, though, or out on the town, so he switched over to Chet-and-Nat instead (likable capable Chet, potentially beautiful Nat) and for the hell of it elected to top off the night with a tall one, a real drink of whiskey, after which he did lose consciousness briefly. And the next thing he knew he was staring at a hostile image of Alfred E. Newman.

  He might have let out a scream, he might have barely suppressed it, again the details were hazy. But it wasn’t Newman after all, it was Ted Fucking Koppel (as Bamford called him), pontificating through his teeth on late-night television. “Bullying people with his dead-fish eyeballs,” in Hal’s phrase. Orrin quickly clicked Koppel goodnight, and was left to muse on the subject of timesis.

  Not everyone knew about timesis, including those who habitually favored its use. Good fucking night! you might say, before you slammed the door. Or Awful damn cold out there, as you wedged your muffler in under your chin. Timesis was simply the practice of jamming an obscenity between the adjective and its noun.

  Orrin had investigated the matter because of Gail. It was a cute surprise habit of hers, to occasionally foul-mouth her delicate formal cadences and to do it just that way, timetically. Of course it was less cute when frequent, or vehement, as when toward the end it seemed she was jamming an oath into every modifier-noun occasion that arose. Orrin supposed he had stumbled onto its significance, finally, when she tucked him out.

  But now he undertook a brief consideration as to whether “Ted” truly modified “Koppel” or merely preceded it, before going on to recall Auden’s famous remark on the frequent use of the adjective “fucking” in the ranks of the British Army, where its only function was to signal the approach of a noun. Not long after that, he lost consciousness again, still on the sofa but this time for eight hours.

  Next morning came the invoice. In the bathroom mirror, Orrin saw what might have been an ailing mole if it hadn’t been himself instead. Because the thought of coffee made him shudder, he took his chances on a single soothing sip of Bushmills, but he felt like the Tin Man gone to rust, with barely the mobility to dress himself. And it was late. Someone down at the office (please God not Harris) had surely been forsaken without flowers.

  Sorrow over this proved no keener than the urge to steer clear altogether, to compound the error of absence by avoidance. Though he started in the direction of the office, Orrin was far from certain it would turn out to be his true destination. Below the footbridge in the Gardens, he paused briefly on a damp bench, with cold sweat standing at his temples. He had lost his conditioning edge with the booze; the much ballyhooed sobriety translated into a simple unfitness for drink.

  Bravely he continued. He would face the music. He was coming out of it. And by the time he hit Beacon, he remembered that he and Eli were on for Davis Hall again tonight. It would be a pleasure to hear the Triple Concerto performed live. At the last light, Orrin paused again, and stood absently humming the first cello crescendo from Beethoven before some of the cold air from Canada came and slapped him along his way.

  10

  Odd (since Jethro was a boy) but it was Elspeth whom he most resembled. He had the Giacometti frame—knees and elbows like knobby joints in the metalwork—and the unique quality of Elspeth’s hair, which could seemingly hold light, store it, and give it back at unlikely moments. Streaky brown hair, thick yet somehow loose, unclustered, it shone from within, might even glow in the dark.

  Gail said that her own was the same as a child, though of course such magic never showed up in faded sepia photographs from the family’s shoebox-files, where she could appear almost homely. She was in fact extremely attractive. Hal Bamford, always quickest to value the distaff, had once remarked she had a rare look among women, that of an adventuress, a co-conspirator in sensuality and action. (While Gail herself was baffled by his statement, others had assented to it and over the years she accumulated gifts that enlivened the theme: a safari hat, malacca cane, and once a diaphanous ivory blouse she would have blushed to wear in her own bedroom much less into the world.)

  Orrin loved the role of Grandpa. It was only a walk-on, a short stint as a sort of good fairy, but he had a genuine rapport with Jethro and Corey that made it more than just palatable. He accepted the odd bout of fatigue or crankiness from them and they did the same for him; plus they were more in tune with his irony—his absurd humor—than were many of his older friends. Often the middle generation, Clyde and Phyll, became the butt of jokes and understandings between the first and third. (“We know what Mom really means, don’t we, Grandpa?”) It might read as a conspiracy, but in fact it served to tie them all together.

  And Orrin enjoyed being lavish. Today, as always, he had taken care to bring along an unbirthday as well as a birthday package and there was never any predicting which would be reckoned the greater prize. A lifelong student of the psychology of birthdays, he had once explained himself to Phyll: “The most apt to cry at the party are the birthday child and his sibling, whose birthday it isn’t. So the second box can change it all.” (Actually the second box could change only half of it; Orrin had no trick for shielding the birthday child himself from tears.)

  As one aged, of course, the sad note underlying a birthday needed little elucidation. But kids did not associate aging with dying, or at least they didn’t feel that a year gained in youth could constitute “aging.” Most were eager to be older, and claim new privileges (“When I was five, I was barely alive/ but now I am six…”) and yet one also heard their pleas for stasis: “And I think I’ll stay six for ever and ever.”

  Children treasured the specificity of their individual lives more than grown-ups knew (or remembered) and so experienced along with the fun and festivities a thoughtful regret that such a special year was ending. They lived in the present, yet on a birthday the past and present for a few hours coincided emotionally, and the regret was there as true human sadness: we will never pass this way again.

  Jethro had yet to crash, though the big crash usually came late in the day, when it could easily be attributed to fatigue from “all the excitement.” Of course Grandpa Orrin was the official Minister of Excitement, with something of a gift for creating frenzy. He led the whole kennel outdoors (and how like a kennel it was, all of them yipping and swarming at his heels) and urged them to hide. Then he hid too, in a large trash barrel under the car-port. When they cottoned on and found him, after a stifling five minutes in the stinking crypt, they laughed wildly, crazily, and tipped the barrel on its side to start it rolling. What did they think, he was made of rubber?

  At least they did not think him ancient (Grandpa the Wrinkled) though he knew in truth they did not think at all, not just now. Nary a thought in their collective head as they spun the barrel over the macadam onto the gland-jarring gravel. “They love you,” said Phyllis, resc
uing him, getting him on his feet somehow. “Yes, but at what price!” said Orrin. And loving their love in spite of himself, he dashed back inside to rig up the Old Stock Pond.

  For this sentimental favorite, Orrin had to crouch behind a blue paisley sheet with a box of cheap traditional toys—yoyos, balsa gliders, mazes, Chinese rings—plus a pail of water. As each child cast his string line over the top off a stick of bamboo, Orrin made splashing sounds in the pail with his hand. Then he would attach a toy to the line and give a tug.

  He was uncomfortable maintaining the catcher’s crouch, especially after his adventures in the rolling barrel, and he soon came to fear that Jethro’s guests might have outgrown the Old Stock Pond. The kids sounded bored, and dissatisfied with their catch. What did they expect, electronic party favors or a winning ticket to the Megabucks? They were all a bit spoiled, as part of the times, he guessed. Me Me Me behavior was once met head on by the elders, but this was the Me Me Me decade, the elders had tacitly approved it.

  Orrin was sorely tempted to tug on Jason’s line and send it back empty, for Jason was the one who had earlier complained there were too few balloons. (Phyll had warned him they would all be named Jason, but only two of them were and the other guy was touchingly sweet.) Orrin, who had come within a pulse of bursting his heart to blow up those tight little balloons, had to stand in mute disgust as Phyll responded to the grievance by quickly inflating two more for the bad Jason, after ascertaining his favorite colors!

  By now, he feared, his own dear Jethro was corrupted too. Just another buck in the swarming animal horde, who took from one pleasure nothing more than a manic desire for the next. This job was not merely tiring, it was disillusioning, for children were not well featured in the plural, or with prizes of any kind at stake. As different as they were, in age and gender, it had been true with Clyde and El: invariably a pleasure with either one alone, permutations of stress with two.