Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

WALDHEIM

Sam Koplovitz was a bookbinder and died poor, and so a burial society called the Sons of Maccabee dug him a grave at Waldheim, a fallow field west of Chicago on the banks of the Des Plaines River. For years he’d been paying that outfit seven dollars annually for a two-plot. As long as he paid up, he figured, he wouldn’t croak. This wishful thinking was effective until March 1941. But here’s the thing: when the time came near for his wife, Rose, thirty-plus years later, she flat out refused to go to Waldheim. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had. His dumbo ears, his monologues from the toilet. The way he never sat in a chair without taking his belt off first. But she said now that her daughter’s husband had money, they’d have to kill her first before she stuck one dead toenail way the hell out there at Waldheim. They buried her in Skokie near the new mall in the early seventies. Of course, Sam doesn’t know this, and by his calculations Rose must be getting on near a hundred and thirty, and he continues to marvel at the strength of her constitution and the progress of modern medicine while at the same time chastising himself for being lonely and wishing that it would end so she would come to him.

RENTERS

Frank had never been one to fight back in the heat of any moment. He would usually wait a few days and then state his opposition to some plan or another of hers without warning. As a strategy for getting his way this usually failed miserably. Marie had just stepped out of the tub when he announced: “Since when have you needed my permission for anything, ever?”

“Is this an ambush?”

He tried to hand her a towel, but she wouldn’t take it.

“You’re wet.”

“Am I?” Marie said. “Really?”

“I’ve been giving it thought.”

“It?”

“The firearm we discussed.”

“Oh, that. I’m not asking. I want it. They’re two entirely different things.”

“We’re going to keep up with the treatments. Another six months and we’ll know—”

“Bad enough every doctor lies to me, but to have you, too. I know it, I feel it. Frankly, Frank—”

“Please, no frankly Franks—”

“Don’t make me laugh. Hurts.”

“—and if we want a second opinion before then, we can always go to Sioux Falls—”

“Whether I’d ever have the guts is another story. I want the comfort. That’s all. Look at me.”

“I’m looking.”

“Fuck Sioux Falls.”

He tried giving her the towel again. She wouldn’t take it and stood there, water on her bony shoulders.

“Now you’re looking.”

“Not very comfortable for me.”

“You? We’re talking about you?”

A half hour later, he went down into the basement and rummaged around. Most of their stuff was still unpacked from the move. He found his 20-gauge in a narrow cardboard box that also held the vacuum cleaner and a barbell. A few times a year he went pheasant hunting with colleagues from his department. He walked slowly up the stairs. She was standing at the kitchen sink with a mug of coffee. He put the shotgun on the table.

“That?”

“I’ll have to buy some shells.”

“Something for under my pillow, Frank. You know I’m talking about something for under my pillow.”

A few weeks later, Frank drove by the old house. Was it a few weeks? Lack of sleep warped time. It was six thirty in the evening in mid-September and the glass in the big front window was burning in the slowly dissipating light. Frank slowed down, considered stopping, but didn’t. It felt disloyal to even look at the place. Still, the farther away from the house he drove, the more he saw the blur of those flames in the window.

Cleaned out, not much of a trace of the years they spent there except possibly the remains of Marie’s garden. Years ago, Frank had built a snow fence to protect the garden from the wind and the deer. Marie would spend Sunday hours out there, squatting and puttering, talking to her plants, coaxing the soil. He thinks of a few stubborn tomatoes, withered lettuce, some hearty beets. Between the two tall maples in the side yard, there might still be a few broken plastic clothespins in the dirt. Moving your stuff out of a place is like unloading a ship, except an empty house doesn’t sail away beyond the horizon. It sits there and waits for you to return. All you have to do one day is head west, on Route 14, because you don’t want to go home right away, and there it is, halfway to Volga, the house, their house. It was never theirs, legally, anyway. Though they didn’t have to be, Marie and Frank were renters, they’d always be renters. They’d never wanted to be beholden. Renting had always felt more free. They could always pick up and move somewhere else, which must be why they never did. If you execute the choice, you lose the choice. When they finally did move back to Brookings to be closer to the clinic, they thought about buying a place, but they were in their mid-fifties now. What would be the point? Especially now. All things being equal, which they weren’t, wouldn’t rent and a mortgage amount to pretty much the same thing for a couple without kids? In their mid-forties, they’d said the same thing. How did they think they’d avoid becoming beholden? Frank spun the car around. As he drove back east, he passed the house once again and thought of them at the windows. How many times had the two of them stood at those windows?

Neither Marie nor Frank was a native. In 1975, they’d moved here from Chicago to teach at South Dakota State. Marie was a nineteenth-century Americanist; Frank taught classics. While the favorite pastime of many of their colleagues was to try and conjure up what heinous crime they must have committed in some other life to deserve exile in this moonscape among the earnest corn-fed, Marie and Frank had come, over the years, to consider eastern South Dakota the only place that would ever be home. Surrounded on all sides by the gentle undulations out near the edge of the horizon. To call this flat isn’t really to look at it. The land rolls, as if it’s always in motion. The switch grass leaning away from the wind. Here and there a clump of trees, and a little over a mile from home, or what used to be home, but still on the property, a hidden arroyo, a private wound in the earth. Only Marie and Frank knew where it was.

But for those front windows, the house itself had been nothing special. The bedrooms were tiny squares, though there were more of them than they needed. They each had one of their own for an office, and one together, which made them feel a little ludicrous and also rich. Sometimes they’d invite each other to their office. Even as recently as a couple of years ago, they still did things like that, slide messages under the doors of their own house. Hey. You busy? Once or twice a summer, they chained Rudy up (they hated to do it, Rudy liked nothing more than roaming when they took walks, this was the single exception), walked to the arroyo, climbed down into that grove of soft sand, and put down a blanket. Nobody knew it. It wasn’t like they showed off to their friends. Look at us, after all these years. Marie’s long red hair spread across the sand. Rudy howling—

She’d stopped appearing in his dreams. Now he’s afraid to fall asleep. Lying there beside her, awake, hours, awake — most disloyal of all, he’s begun to remember her as if she’s already gone.

It was Marie who had found the house. It was Marie who had insisted, so many years ago now, that they move outside of Brookings. Frank had protested, asked what would be the point, it’s not like we’re tenant farmers. But Marie said, If we’re going to live here, let’s at least endure the landscape.

“You mean experience?”

“That, too.”

It had been a long time since anybody farmed the land that went with the house. Schactler, their old landlord, had two other farms in Beadle County but always meant to restart operations on theirs. Every time he came by to collect the rent, he said, “Won’t be long now before you hear the sound of the tractor out here, you two won’t mind a little noise?” But neither of his sons came home from college in the East as they’d promised. Nothing made Schactler prouder than that his sons were too good to come home to South Dakota and work the land with their father. Even so, he slaved away, keeping the other farms going, and so was content to get a little house rent off the third place. Schactler once said renting a house was one thing, to rent out land another. He couldn’t stomach what another man might do with it. Like your woman, he said, winking at Frank. Marie said Schactler might be an unreconstructed Neanderthal, but what he said about land made sense. There’s a way to call something sacred without getting high and mighty about it. After his wife died, Schactler slowly began to slow down. He stopped talking farming the third farm, stopped talking about his boys coming home. Mrs. Schactler had been a kind, shrewd woman who always complimented Frank on Marie. What’s a homely-looking character doing with a fiery sass like that? And she never got on them, even with her eyes, as God knows so many other people did for years, about: where were the children.

For years, in early May, Schactler used to light a controlled burn to prepare the fields around the house for the planting he never got around to doing. The glow of those fires. How they’d turn off all the lamps and stand at the window and watch the flames poke up into the night. Last he heard, Schactler was in a nursing home in Aberdeen. Soon his boys would come home to sell all three farms.

He thought of the way the night wind would press against the big window, as if someone were out in the dark pushing against it with both hands.

In the old kitchen, her head lying on a stack of student papers, her eyes wide open, the sun a rising layer of pink on the outer fields.

“Come to bed.”

“Tomorrow’s tiring.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Even the plants exhaust me, the toaster—”

Raising her head in the blue dawn, eyes blazing, not tired at all.

“Stop being terrified, Frank. We can’t both be. Who’ll remember to feed the dog?”

“Isn’t arroyo a gorgeous word?” Marie said.

“It is.”

“Origin?”

“Everyone else around here says creek, it’s only us—”

“Origin?”

“Spanish. Pre-Roman.”

“It’s like a nook, a cranny. All my life I’ve been looking for a good cranny. Bury me here.”

“Stop.”

“It’s just biology. It’s all just biology.”

“Marie.”

“You won’t?”

“Furthermore,” Frank said, “it’s a zoning issue. You can’t just bury people—”

That night, after driving by the old house, he did find Rudy barking along the fence line of the new house when he pulled up. He leaped out of the car and flung open the front door and found Marie lying on the couch, her head thrown back against the armrest, a book on the floor. He ran across the carpet, knelt, and gripped her knees. He looked up at the bare walls. Their paintings and posters and framed photographs were still in boxes from the move, though they had already lived eight months in this new place. Couldn’t he at least have unpacked a few and nailed up some pictures? Why had he waited so long? He gripped her knees. The leash of the oxygen tank gently resting on her bare clavicle. After a moment, under his own heavy breathing, hers, shallow, nearly silent. He lifted his head and watched her sleep and waited for the relief that was sure to wash over him. He waited, and still it didn’t come. The fires, M., do you remember Schactler’s fires?

Don’t forgive me—

ON THE 14

On the Mission bus today I sat across from Uncle Horace who has been dead for twenty-odd years. The last time I saw him was at Aunt Molly’s in Fall River. On the bus, he looked tired. He was barefoot. He looked like he didn’t want to talk. When I knew him, Uncle Horace always wanted to talk. He always wanted to tell you who he knew. Horace was a man who made great claims of knowing people. Chiang Kai-shek, Julius Rosenwald, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan! On the bus, he was bedraggled, as if God had left him out in the rain for decades. The bus was hot and crowded, our breath was clouding the windows. There was no room to take off our coats. At Fourteenth and Mission, an enormous teetering woman with uncountable numbers of Safeway bags got on and my uncle shot up from his seat, swooped his arm, and announced, Madam, to your rest!

Standing on the bus now, my uncle was hunchbacked. He’d always had great posture. (“At Eton,” he used to say, “we always ate sitting to the trot.”) On the bus he was so stooped over I could have set a table on him, and would have, too, if I’d had some dishes. We could have had tea and crumpets like old times. Bent, drenched, broke, pilloried, my dead uncle. He slipped the woman with the bags of groceries his card and told her to come by his office Tuesday after lunch.

“I’m back from the club by 2:30 at the latest. Bring your checkbook, My Lady. Or cash.”

He began moving through the crowd, handing out his card. “Wise up, people. Money begets money. You want to ride the Fourteen for the rest of your lives?”

When my stop was next, I yanked the cord and got up, stood by the middle door. A moment later, a moist, oddly soft hand enwrapped my neck. I turned to him, and he spoke as if I was me but also as if this didn’t matter, as if my being myself, whoever this was, couldn’t have less to do with anything.

“Nobody can take them away from you,” he said, his little face bunched, his shoulders rising past his ears.

“What?”

Those fingers on my neck, not holding exactly, only resting, almost as though he were gently feeling my pulse, as if I was the one—

“The lies you tell are the only things that stay,” Horace said. “Truth won’t get you a cup of coffee in hell. Forget about the Ritz, honey.”

“But,” I said, “because of your lies, they all died broke. Haddy, Charlie, Pauline, Nelson, Dotty, Stanley, Ida, Molly — Grandma Sarah used to say that you went for everybody in town’s quarters, but when it came to relations, you went for their nickels, too.”

“A tony relative in every family. You play your part, you do your share.”

“And everyone ponied up — except Irv Pincus, who could always smell a rat when a rat—”

“Still, not a bad record.”

“Yes, and it was you—”

“It was I!”

“Proud?”

“I was loaded. They all wanted what I had. I’m blame? I’m criminal?”

“But the only reason you had what you had was because they gave you all their money.”

“A technicality!”

“Grandpa Walt dropped dead after reading his bank statement.”

“Your grandfather had a weak heart. Not to mention no stomach for business.”

“Your own son — Monroe — finally went bonkers. They had to lock him up at Taunton State five years ago.”

“The Ginsburgs have no lunacy.”

“He literally tore his hair out of his head with his hands—”

“Must have been on his mother’s side.”

“Remorse?”

Uncle Horace stood up a little straighter. “A legacy, boy, a legacy. May you leave one yourself. That way you wouldn’t have to steal mine. Then again, how much do you think it’s worth? How about we go seventy/thirty? Go ahead sell it, sell it all!”

“And Josephine?”

“Leave her out of this happy reunion.”

“I mean the humiliation—”

“I said leave her out—”

“—to beg for handouts from her own flesh and blood, the very people you plundered—”

“Not once did she beg. Listen: Nobody didn’t love Josephine. If I’d been the Boston Strangler, they’d have emptied their pockets—”

“And they did! They did!”

“And may you for a single day of your life, for one hour, know the kind of love that I—”

“Wait, what are you doing in California?”

“Everybody ends up in California.”

The doors flapped open: Twentieth Street. Before he stepped down, Uncle Horace leaned to me. That old smell again, of Aunt Molly’s. A reek of bleach and onions. He smooched one ear, then the other.

“Sayonara, turkeyboy.”

LONGFELLOW

My brother used to terrorize me with a small rubber hippopotamus named Longfellow. He was about the size of a tooth, and he spoke in an extremely high, piercing voice. Longfellow said it wasn’t my fault I was so limited intellectually, that it was simply the luck of the draw and with hard work, and perhaps some family connections, one day I might be able to eke out a living. Now, Big Bill Thompson-Fox was the mayor of the town where Longfellow lived. Unlike Longfellow, the mayor was kind to me. The town was called Pubic, Illinois. Big Bill Thompson-Fox was a finger puppet of a fox in a policeman’s uniform and my brother endowed him with the gentle, patient drawl of Sheriff Andy Taylor. A child psychologist might say that Longfellow and Big Bill Thompson-Fox represented the two sides of my brother’s nature. On the one hand, I was his brother and he hated me, and on the other hand, I was his brother and he loved me. I don’t know. All I know is that Big Bill’s kindness barely made a dent, because even though he had a relatively important job (part-time mayor of a town of about 550 Pubians) and Longfellow didn’t seem to have a job at all, the mayor was no match for the hippo.

I also lived in Pubic, or my voice did. I was the voice of the Matchbox Chevrolet Caprice that served as Big Bill Thompson-Fox’s limousine. I wasn’t supposed to say any words. The car didn’t know any. My role was to make automotive noises at appropriate moments. As I say, Longfellow’s chief preoccupation was making me cry, but he also spent much of his time and energy disrupting city council meetings and haranguing Big Bill Thompson-Fox for things like misappropriation of public funds, giving out no-bid contracts to shadowy underworld cronies, and in general fostering a culture of corruption that pervaded Pubic from the lowliest branch post office to the fifth floor of City Hall. One day Longfellow advocated impeachment of Big Bill after he allowed me (i.e., his car) to vote on an important resolution that would have limited fluorocarbon emissions. Longfellow claimed that it was a blatant conflict of interest. For the record, I voted against the resolution, because I felt that any restrictions on the auto industry would have resulted in the loss of American jobs. After Longfellow raised his loud objections (Kickbacks! Backroom cigars! Sweetheart deals!), Big Bill Thompson-Fox, in what I thought was a pretty brilliant switcheroo, claimed that my vote actually hadn’t counted, that it was nonbinding. “In certain circumstances,” Mayor Thompson-Fox said, “interested members of the public may, according to our charter, weigh in, in a purely advisory capacity, on matters of particular interest, in order to give them more of a voice in government. It’s a unique and quite participatory feature of our democracy here in Pubic. It’s actually based on a pre-Napoleonic French model.”

“Ah ha, Chevrolet. I knew all along there was something francophone about that car!”

“Please, sir, we’ll have no unseemly outbursts.”

“Oh, you and your Robert’s Rules of Order…”

“Bailiff!” Big Bill Thompson-Fox cried. “Where’s the bailiff?”

I made car noises to the effect that we didn’t have a bailiff on the payroll.

Longfellow would not be silenced. Big Bill Thompson-Fox and his car remained on the carpet. It was Longfellow who attained the heights of the prophet. My brother set the hippo on his head and intoned: “Taxidermy without representation is tyranny. If this be treason, you can kiss my ass back to the Zambezi.”

In 1990, I found Longfellow in a drawer in my mother’s house, along with some rolling papers (my mother’s), circa 1975. He’d survived my parents’ divorce, three moves, and two remarriages, the little shit. I held a summary trial. Longfellow stood accused of assault, slander, noise pollution, and a myriad of immigration violations.

“Any last words?”

“Yo, toothache, what’s with the shilly-shally? If you’re going to do it, do it.”

I popped his head off with a toenail clipper. And though there was ample evidence (the clipper in my hand, the severed rubber head on the carpet), I could not be prosecuted, because the municipality where the execution allegedly occurred no longer existed and local criminal statutes could not apply. Under the letter of the law, you can’t be found guilty of killing anybody in Atlantis unless you can dredge up that jurisdiction from the bottom of the sea. Same is true for Narnia, Bedrock, and Nimh, where the brave rats live. Nonetheless, legal niceties aside, there is the human heart to consider. The only certain thing is, you’ll be brothers forever, my mother used to say. Everything else in your entire life — health, money, sex — is all crapshoot.

I clip his head off and still — still, thy brother’s blood cries out in a high, high voice only dogs and myself can hear.

PADDY BAULER IN A QUIET MOMENT DeLuxe Gardens, 403 West North Avenue, 1964

The clown prince had them. All his raucous talk, his famous quotable lines, and yet there were certain nights, late in his career, when, if there was no committee meeting or funeral or wake or wedding, the once-mighty alderman would shoo out the stragglers and lock the door. This particular boozing shed is closed. And the man himself would slump on a stool, quiet, and face himself in the mirror of his own bar. Mr. Bauler, sir, aren’t you on the wrong side of the slab? Think about it. A real conundrum. When you’re Paddy Bauler, you can’t go see Paddy Bauler. Where does this leave me? And he laughs. Not out loud, an inside laugh, the kind you can carry around for hours, days, years even, the kind of laugh you might carry to the end if you don’t take yourself too seriously. But here’s another conundrum. Lately he’s stopped laughing all that much, outside or inside laughs. A German, he’s been playing an Irishman so long he’s started to dream of his own boggy grave. Used to be that it was all laughs — and votes. Now, that’s how you run a city. A vote is loyalty and loyalty is a vote… a lifetime of them. See? Easy. From the cradle to the grave. (Casket courtesy of the Democratic Party.) And you’re either constant to the party or you aren’t constant to the party. No such thing as halfway. Independent? Ha! Go see Paddy Bauler.

Heal me, Ward Heeler.

A mammoth man, but soft all over. A. J. Liebling described him as more gravel pit than mountain. Alderman Bauler used to wrestle himself on the floor of the mayor’s office for the personal entertainment of His Honor Mayor Anton Cermak himself.

Cermak martyred, the lucky Bohemian. Pat Nash gone. Ed Kelly gone. Paddy Bauler? Is that antediluvian still kicking around?

Hey, Paddy, spot me a drink. You know I’m good for it. Don’t I always carry my precinct for you?

Paddy, my boiler’s busted. They want three hundred and fifty bucks.

Hey, Paddy, listen, Paddy. My son. Knocked his old lady around a little. Talk to Sergeant Itagopian for me?

Paddy, it’s my mother — the cancer—

Paddy, it’s Eddie Gabinik; don’t you remember me?

Paddy?

Paddy?

Mr. Bauler?

Sir?

GERALDO, 1986

He warns us that what’s inside might not be appropriate for children and other sensitive viewers. Al Capone’s lost vault. They’re tearing down the Lexington Hotel, once the Big Tuna’s headquarters, and have discovered a vault that’s been sealed for decades. Who knew he lost one? Who even cared? But now that Chicago knows it, the city is awash in hysterical anticipation. And Geraldo’s got the exclusive. Live. I’m alone in front of the TV with a joint and a hunk of cheese. There’s a team of hard-hatted workmen with jackhammers and high explosives. There are wafts of dust and lots of noise, and Geraldo whisper-shouts into the microphone. We’re making history here. It goes on for more than an hour and a half, with frequent commercial breaks.

At one point Geraldo says, “I feel like Jeremiah walking among the ruins.”

Look, Geraldo, just open the thing already.

Finally, they blast the door off. Geraldo coughs, gasps, says something inaudible — there’s an enormous crash. The camera jumbles and the screen goes blank. Cut to another commercial. Geraldo’s dead and they’re selling antacid. And Oldsmobiles and Mountain Dew. And then he’s back, undaunted. Geraldo Rivera knows no daunted. Wait. He’s holding something. A bottle. Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Chicago, interested parties around the world, we’ve made a discovery. Pause. Swallow. Alphonsus Capone — alias Scarface alias Big Tuna alias Jolly Fellow alias Snorky — may have once drunk from this very bottle before carrying out yet another despicable act, the likes of which have made this city infamous around the globe. Go to the deepest Amazon, as I have, Geraldo says, and there you might meet, as I did, a little native boy, naked, nothing but a loincloth hardly covering his burgeoning private parts, and tell him, as I did, that you are from Chicago, and he’ll say, Chicago! Chicago! Capone! Pow! Pow! Kill! Kill! Kill! Yes, the lips of such a man may have once touched the phallic spout of this very bottle…

The camera zooms in on the bottle’s label. Ernest and Julio Gallo, 1981. Pans back to Geraldo’s stricken face. Maybe someone back at the station was thinking, Now at last we’ll get rid of this chucklehead. Geraldo looks as if he wants to eat the microphone’s afro. Not much can leave this man wordless. But I keep watching, we all keep watching. The wonder of live television — even after nothing’s happened, it keeps happening. Plus, there is always the chance that Geraldo might spontaneously combust. Soldier on, Geraldo, we’re still with you.

“Friends,” his voice rising to a squeal. “Friends, how on earth did this bottle, this vessel of Dionysus, find its way through the impregnable walls of a sealed vault? Only in a city as diseased as this one, where vice still flows like milk down an sinless child’s throat, like blood in the veins, like sewage in the drainage canal, could one of the greatest robbers in the history of the known world be himself robbed, the thief thieved, the boodler boodled. Oh, my friends, mystery begets mystery begets mystery — it’s the very fornication of existence in this modern Gomorrah we call Chicago.”

What were we expecting? That the vault would be our King Tut’s tomb? Pompeii in the Loop? Maybe we were just heartened that, even here, something could survive, something remain. In a city where all is knocked down and all is replaced, maybe we just want to know something has been here all along. A solitary man holds a bottle and a microphone amid plumes of old dust. Nobody gives a damn what’s in the vault, Geraldo. Times like these all you want is to hear a voice, any voice. In the afternoons, I bag groceries at the Dominick’s on Skokie Highway. I’m seventeen. When I get fired, which will be soon, the manager will say, Listen, putz, you’ll never work at a Dominick’s again, anywhere in the Chicagoland area and northern Indiana — you got it? You’re not competent, you lack basic competences. Mostly, though, I’m just lonely, a new kind of lonely. I’d think about all the eyes that would never look my way, all the eyes that were always turning away. Do you remember? When all you had was your own sweaty needs, your own endless furious needs?

HAROLD WASHINGTON WALKS AT MIDNIGHT Out at Midway Airport

No one in this city, no matter where they live or how they live, is free from the fairness of my administration. We’ll find you and be fair to you wherever you are.

— HAROLD WASHINGTON, 51ST MAYOR OF CHICAGO

Of Harold Washington, people used to say that as long as he had political combat on his hands he’d never be lonely, and that was all well and good while he was alive, but it caused problems for the mayor in paradise. After a few years of paying his dues in heaven’s trenches, he challenged Gabriel for archangel and nearly pulled it off with 47.6 percent of the vote. Disgruntled and jealous cherubs supported him in droves. Finally, God’s chief of staff, just to get rid of him for a while, let Harold Washington come home for a small, unannounced visit.

It was Martha who spotted him by the baggage claim, long after the last flight had come and gone. She was sweeping up, the last hour of her shift. She said his face had the haggard look of someone who has been crying for years, one way or another.

“Do you know what I mean?” she asked her friend Lucy, the only person she told this to, the only person who would believe her. The two of them were having lunch in the employee cafeteria. Lucy said she knew what she meant. She understood that a man’s dry face could have the look of weeping. She mentioned her uncle Jomo. “He had the look, too. Uncle Jomo’s wife died while he was still in his thirties. He put his grief on with his clothes every morning. When did you see the mayor?”

“Last Thursday,” Martha said.

“Did he say anything?”

“Not at first. I went up and told him that the Orlando flight came in an hour ago. There’s no more bags, sir. You can contact the luggage office in the morning. Everybody from Delta’s gone home. Then he turned to me with a finger on his lips and I knew.”

“How’d he look?” Lucy asked.

“Thinner.”

“No! When that man was done eating chicken, he’d start in on the table legs.”

“All of it gone. And his shoulders were stooped — bony, really,” Martha said. “His trench coat looked like it was hanging off two doorknobs.”

Lucy watched her friend. She had that good way of listening — with her elbows on the table and her hands propping up her face like two bookends. Neither of them was eating anymore.

“Our burdens,” Lucy said.

“Yes,” Martha said.

“My God, remember,” Lucy said. “They wouldn’t let the man do a thing. The mayor would want to take a leak and Eddy Vrdolyak would vote against it.”

“I remember, I remember,” Martha said. “How could anybody not remember?”

“You forget how people forget.”

“Mmmmm.”

“What about his eyes?”

“Still beautiful.”

“So what’d he say?”

“He said Midway looks like a real airport now. Richie Daley, I said, and he looked at me with those eyes. I said, I hate to break it to you, Mr. Mayor, but Richie is king now, and he shouted, Richie Daley, that unworthy dauphin? The father was one thing, a cretin but a man with innate political talent, even brains, a man who somehow — somehow — kept his own nostrils clean while the putrescence of corruption oozed around him. No, the father was one thing. But if Richie Daley is the second coming, I’m Annette Funicello.”

Martha gasping, laughing. “The Mouseketeer?”

“That’s what he said. Even made those ears behind his head with his fingers.”

“And he laughed? He laughed?”

“Half laughed, half didn’t.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Then he cleared his throat, all mayoral, and asked if the pay was any better now that this is a real airport. I said, ‘Sir, there haven’t been any other miracles besides you.’ And then he did laugh, Luce. He laughed until what was left of his poor body wasn’t there anymore.”

FROM THE COLLECTED STORIES OF EDMUND JERRY (E. J.) HAHN, VOL. IV

E.J. dead now too, still talking. Telling me about his yellow-and-purple-daisied ’69 VW bus, about piling in fourteen friends, acquaintances, and a few folks he never laid eyes on before and driving from Sheboygan to New York to see Joan Baez at the Fillmore East. Motherfucking Manhattan, I’m telling you. From our little cow-shit college in Wisconsin it was like landing on a ring of Saturn. We didn’t know our mothers’ names. I don’t remember a thing about the ride except the fog. Outside the van and inside the van. E.J. nudging me. Nirvana highway, brother, Heh, heh. And that Carrington drove through Ohio with his feet. Tried it in Pennsylvania with his dick till he drove us off the road. Carrington with a name like some Earl of Edinburgh, though his parents were Christian Scientists from Rhinelander. Carrington, Carrington, Carrington. Whose idea it was to buy the refrigerator for Chuck and Kathy D.? I told you about the refrigerator? About Chuck and Kathy D.? How they got married sophomore year and were so poor they couldn’t afford to rent a place with a fridge, so to keep food from spoiling, Chuck would leave sausages and cheese and eggs outside on the porch all night and then run out there at dawn, naked, grab the stuff, and throw it in a pan on the hot plate for breakfast, then nosedive back into their single little-boy bed and make fast and furious morning love to Kathy D. Oh, Kathy D.! One day Carrington and I were shoplifting in Sears and we saw this Frigidaire on sale for sixty-five dollars, and Carrington goes up to it and starts licking it, saying, My dearest, my dearest, till the salesman came over and said, What in holy name? And so we borrowed ten bucks from the salesman, who only wanted us lost, another seven from a woman in the sewing machine department, a five spot from the stock boy, another couple from a little old lady clutching her handbag in Housewares. We made the down payment. This was in ’74 and we were Sheboygan’s hippies. So unique in town we were almost a source of pride. Oh, Sheboygan: city of cheese curd and churches. The rest we got on credit. That fridge is still unpaid for, wherever it is, rusting away in oblivion. Our accounts will never balance. Of course, the problem with Carrington was he never stopped. The best hustlers can’t. It was always something else. He started eight different folk bands our senior year, founded a commune on his cousin’s farm in Oshkosh, asked for handouts, saying it’s not a cult, it’s about love, brothers and sisters, love. By then he was using heavier than the rest of us. The year of Our Lord, the Bicentennial. Jimmy Carter’s buckteeth and Alfred Joseph Carrington the Third on a float in the Fourth of July parade. God knows how he got up there, but there was Carrington, strung out in General Washington’s boat crossing the Delaware, Cub Scouts dressed like elves straddling his legs and whacking him with paper muskets like he was some favorite drunken uncle.

He vanished for good the day after graduation. Not that he graduated. But he did dance across the stage wearing the empty diploma case on his head like a tepee. In ’82 I got a letter from his lawyer brother. Carrington dead in Houston, a broken needle jammed in his arm. Our Duke of Cornwall bled to death in a motel room shower. The lawyer wrote his death was a blessing, not very disguised. Can you beat that? His own brother. You run out of time is what I’m saying, is what I’m always saying. Whether you waste it or not. Some people you never shake. Carrington, what, dead fifteen years now and still he’s egging me on? We dumped the fridge in the yard in front of Chuck and Kathy D.’s. We’d crammed it full of Schlitz and watermelons. And Carrington, the maestro in a tux, and Kathy D. running barefoot across the snow, wide mouth, shocked, tits bobbing, yelling, Oh my gods! like she’d just won a convertible on The Price Is Right, except we were in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, my friend, and it was February and we were doing the hula around that sacred appliance in the snow, and oh how fucked up, oh how gloriously — never again — fucked up we were.

THE GATE

None but the wind should warn of your returning.

— TOWNES VAN ZANDT, “NONE BUT THE RAIN”

It wasn’t visiting hours. They let me in anyway, after I begged from a wall phone on the first floor. She was on the third floor. I needed a special code to work the elevator. After I buzzed, I was led into the TV room, which was also a lunchroom. She was waiting there, holding a book. I can’t remember what the title was, but I remember staring at the cover. It had a drawing of an ornate iron gate. Beyond the gate was a gray sea. We sat across from each other. She laughed. She told me about a guy who earlier that morning had called his mother from the phone at the nurses’ station and shouted, so the entire floor could hear, could she please get him out of here so he could kill himself in peace. She pointed to a boy — he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen — sitting at one of the lunch tables listening to headphones, peacefully drumming the table with his palms. That’s him, she said. He’ll be all right.

“You’ll be all right, too,” I said.

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“You will.”

“Don’t say it again, all right?”

I looked around the room. In the corner was a pile of tattered boxes of board games. A stack of old magazines. There was a computer inside what looked like a video arcade game, the screen behind thick glass, a keyboard dangling from a chain.

“I brought you a brownie,” I said.

We used to say we lived in the country of us. I’ve never been able to explain this to anyone, though everyone I have told has nodded like they understood. Nine years we lived there. I watched her eat a brownie.

“Aren’t I thin?”

“You’re too thin.”

“Want some brownie?”

“No, I brought it for you.”

“Take some.”

She handed me a piece of the brownie. Nine years. Our fingers met. A half hour later, the kind small man with an accent — Polish? — unlocked the door and let me out.

A couple of years before I was born, my mother took my four-year-old brother and ran away from my father, home to Massachusetts and her parents, where they holed up like fugitives. She said she wouldn’t go back to Chicago if she was dragged by a train. My brother had a field day with Grandpa Walt, staying up all night eating doughnuts and talking about whether Johnson would dump Humphrey from the ticket. A week later, my father flew east. He knelt on the sidewalk with white roses and sang her name. Neighbors watched the drama from behind their curtains. Phones rang up and down Robeson Street. Vivian, can you get more romantic with a capital R? But those days before he showed up, I think about them, the stillness of my mother’s mornings. Something peaceful about the possibility of my own nonexistence. My mother didn’t go see any of her friends. The farthest she ventured from her old bedroom was the backyard, where she sat on the huge boulder she used to sit on as a kid, her chin in her hand, and her father would call out the window of his study, Hey, would you look at the thinker perched on her rock? Except that he didn’t say anything, only watched her, she being twenty-six and married now.

FALL RIVER, 1967

My mother stands by the window, holding a duster, listening to Frank Zappa. Like a lot of people, she pretended to like the music more than she actually did, which is what Zappa himself counted on. He figured if people pretended long enough, they might actually start to listen. No one’s here but me, and I am asleep. She dusts a little, but there’s something about the song, the stopping and the starting, the half-talking, half-singing—Movin’ to Montana soon / Gonna be a Dental Floss tycoon—that makes her want to refuse in principle to do anything productive. Zappa’s pretty out there, her friend Judy had said when she gave her the record. It isn’t a place my mother is at all against going — out there. Now I am awake and shrieking. To buy a minute or two, she turns up the volume. My mother examines the duster. It is made of some sort of feathers and she wonders what dead bird was worth this clean apartment, or anybody’s.

CHICAGO, 1973

It may have been in The Wapshot Chronicle where someone — the grandmother? — leaves Middlemarch outside during a storm. All those heroically screwed-up lives — all those hopes, all those beautiful failures — bloated with rain. It made me think of my mother in her room. Sometimes she’d stay up all night, reading. Middlemarch was one of the books always on the table beside the bed. It was the guest room, but we called it her room. She no longer shared my father’s. We didn’t have many guests. The door’s locked. Sometimes at night my father comes and tries the knob.

HIGHLAND PARK, 1978

THE MOORS OF CHICAGO

We’d go out to the hill at night, Stu Barkus and me, and sometimes the moon was out and we could see each other’s lips move in the dark. Old conversations dry up like rain. I haven’t seen Barkus in years. I tried calling him after I heard his father died, but the number I had didn’t work.

Still, out there, there was an easiness, the rare kind of easiness you get with someone you’ve known so long there’s no need to prove anything. Sometimes we’d smoke a little, talk some more, but now that I’m thinking of the hill, mostly what I remember is us not talking. And I remember remembering. My parents used to take my brother and me up to the hill. My mother would lie on her back and stare at the sky. My father would talk. My mother would look at the sky and sometimes answer him, sometimes not. I’d run around in circles in the grass. From the very top you could see the lake. My mother called the hill the moors of Chicago. It wasn’t until I read but didn’t finish Wuthering Heights in college that I understood what she was talking about, but even then I think I realized that there was something unhappy about the place. Maybe not the place itself exactly, but our place in it. It was too vast, too open, and too full of other people’s laughter. Maybe this is why my parents brought us out there. Maybe they thought something would rub off on us. One time my father brought a kite he’d built from a kit. It was made of thin wooden sticks and paper so fine you could blow your nose with it. He spent an hour in the basement that morning gluing the kite together. He got it off the ground, but the wind ripped the spindle — is it called a spindle? — out of my hand, and the kite fluttered and took a nosedive into the grass. I cheered. Then I went over and jumped on it, crushed it to pieces.

Out there with Stu Barkus under the moon, I remembered this and told him about it. He listened. Barkus didn’t tell his own stories. He didn’t tell me, for instance, as I might have done, about a time he betrayed his own father’s small attempt at something approximating love. If he said anything at all, I don’t remember what it was. He may only have nodded his head in the dark.

My father tried, my mother tried. They knew they’d end sooner or later. In the meantime, we had to live. So they took us out to the moors, a mythical place that we all thought existed. Other people’s laughter on the wind. My mother on the grass staring at the sky, my father talking, my brother reading. I was the youngest, wandering in circles.

BELIEF, 1999

An old Communist who believed in it once and for all time, but who also, almost from the very beginning, nursed a healthy animosity for the liars who carried it out and fouled it up — so he was never considered by anyone who mattered to be a very good Communist — walks the streets of Nusle in northwest Prague with hunched shoulders. Feet no good anymore, and so he shuffles, wanders, watches the changes, watches the young men and their cars, watches the apartment balconies crumble. What good was believing? And yet the alternative was not having faith in his fellow men, and isn’t this another way of dying? Now he shuffles and watches, not hating any of it, any of them, but at the same time lording over them like the god he always swore he never wanted to be, and yet, if there’s been any change at all in him after thirty-two years of heavy labor at Poldi Kladno, it is this: that he’s so old now he is like a god, not participating, only watching, not giving any opinions, not scoffing, not pointing his glass and spouting off in the pub about the way things were then — none of that. Only existing, whatever this means, if it can mean anything for a man who no longer has the strength to work. And even the love he once had for Marketa has boiled down and hardened, so that it’s not even a memory anymore. More like one of the rocks she used to line up on the windowsill in the kitchen. He can pick it up and hold it, but it doesn’t jolt him. Marketa used to tell him not to be so serious, that he was always so serious, watching himself as though from a camera on the wall. You a movie star, Bohumil?

Irv Pincus used to steal lamps from Kaplan’s Furniture and turn around and sell them in the alley at a deep discount. As a salesman inside the store, the man never lifted a pinkie, but in the alley Irv could really move the merchandise. The store’s gone. In ’66 the state of Massachusetts built I-195 smack through downtown. Kaplan’s gone. City Hall gone. Dug a hole right through Main Street. Eminent domain, the sovereign power to take property for necessary public good. What good the new highway ever did for this city other than allow the rest of the world to drive right by and ignore it, Walt never knew. But maybe this was the point. Don’t slow down, people, otherwise you might notice what’s been lost. When they tore his store down, Walt stood on the sidewalk and wept into his sleeve. Not the store itself he mourned but the hours he spent at his office window watching, among other things, Irv Pincus fleece him in broad daylight. Try explaining this to my wife. It’s the pictures in my head, Sarah, it’s the pictures in my head they’re wrecking. How am I supposed to hold it all without the brick and mortar around to remind me? Walt Kaplan died a decade later at fifty-nine years old. But can’t you see Irv Pincus out there behind the store, auctioning off $150 Hudson Bay lamps to the highest bidder? Shirtsleeves, his flabby arms swinging: Do I hear a hundred? Ninety? Eighty-five? Fifty? Anybody? Forty and it’s a deal. The man outlived Walt Kaplan by more years than anybody in the family bothered to count. Irv relocated to Miami Beach and called it America, sand between his toes, bless his pilfering soul.

FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS, 1957

SHHHHHH, ARTHUR’S STUDYING ROMAN UPHEAVAL TOPIC OF A BOOK BY DR. KAPLAN

Can Cataline be cleared? The reputation of the Roman conspirator assigned to infamy in the polemics of Cicero has been reclaimed…

— FALL RIVER HERALD NEWS, SEPTEMBER 25, 1968

Walt’s brother Arthur was a quiet boy who grew into an accomplished man. When they were boys, it was always Shhhhhh, Arthur’s studying. There’s got to be at least one yeshiva bocher in every family and a yeshiva bocher’s got to have quiet. Go play outside, Walt, your brother’s studying. And so Walt went to work in their father’s furniture store and Arthur went to college, first to Brown and then to Columbia for his Ph.D. in classics. Arthur’s face was pale. He always looked as though he’d been dusted with flour. This added to his gravitas, and Walt, like the rest of the family, was proud that Arthur looked the part of a scholar ghost.

Arthur’s first and only book appeared in 1968. For a man who lived such a quiet life (he’d married a wan, squirrelly-looking girl and they lived in Brooklyn without children), the book turned out to be a bit scandalous. The title was innocuous enough: Cataline and His Role in the Roman Revolution. Yet the book was a surprisingly spirited, and graphic, defense of Cataline, a man who apparently made a lot of trouble two thousand years ago. Here he was now, wreaking havoc once again via the pen of meek little Arthur Kaplan, a man who came out of the womb speaking Latin. They called him a villainous fiend, murderer, corrupter of youth and donkeys, venial proprietor, traitor, drunken debauchee, temple robber… Plutarch himself topped it off with the accusation that Cataline deflowered his own daughter.

And all this in the prologue.

What? the family gasped. What? Don’t get us wrong. An author is an author is an author, and our Arthur is an author. His name’s right there on the cover. But incest? Donkeys? Maybe he should have been out in the street playing stickball with Walt.

“Maybe nobody will read it.”

“Ah yes. Of course, that’s the ticket. Nobody will read it!”

“But we’ll put it on the shelf.”

“Yes, absolutely. We’ll put it on the shelf.”

Upon Arthur’s triumphant return to Fall River, he gave a short speech at his alma mater, BMC Durfee High School, noting that the destruction of Cataline’s reputation was the result of the same sort of mudslinging that characterizes the politics of today. “And if you think the Romans were violent? Maybe we ought to look at ourselves in this year, 1968. It is often not the great man who is ultimately heard but his detractors. Detractors always shout louder and use more colorful language. Elections bring out the poet in politicians, don’t they? Take, for instance, the consular elections of sixty-four B.C., when Cicero called Piso (father of Caesar’s last wife, Calpurnia), among other things, brute, plague, butcher, linkboy of Cataline, lump of carrion, drunken fool, inhuman lunatic, feces, epicurean pig, assassin, temple robber, plunderer of Macedonia, infuriated pirate egged on by desire for booty and rapine… And yet it must be said that compared to Piso, Cataline was a red pepper.”

This was followed by an expectant pause. Arthur leaned over the podium, gaped at his audience, and waited.

Someone whispered loudly — it may have been Aunt Haddy — Does he have to keep making those awful lists?

Arthur said it again: “Compared to Piso, Cataline was a red pepper!”

Arthur’s pasty face, his eyes imploring. Sarah nudged Walt: What’s he talking about?

Shhhhhhhhhh.

Walt dug his mouth in his wife’s ear. Claude Pepper, the pinko senator. He’s making a joke. And so it was Walt who finally, out of mercy, rescued his brother by laughing. Everybody else followed his lead. Ah, Red Pepper! Cataline was a Red Pepper! Ha, ha.

Ha.

Are you finished with this speech, Arthur?

One night, about a month or so later, it was Walt who after dinner took the book off the shelf in the living room where Sarah had safely stored it for posterity. He carried it upstairs to his study in the flat of his hand like a waiter carrying a tray. Then he locked the door and went to Rome. Night was thinning into morning by the time Cataline uttered the last of his famous last words: But if fortune frowns on your bravery, take care not to die unavenged. Do not be captured and slaughtered like cattle, but, fighting like heroes, leave the enemy a bloody and tearful victory.

Walt hears trumpets. If fortune frowns! Viva Cataline! Viva the traitor!

Furthermore, as my brother so cogently argues, no self-respecting republic should be without a little healthy rebellion. It keeps everybody honest, and with a blowhard like Cicero around, somebody had to draw a line across the Forum with his sword. Walt slides off his chair and onto the carpet. He stares at the ceiling. His study has always been a box that envelops him, protects him. There are days he mourns this room, wonders how it will go on without him when he’s gone. Right now, the distance between himself on the floor and the ceiling is intolerable.

I’m lying in a grave on my own carpet. To think there are people who believe that, when it’s all over, the angels sing and we float up higher and higher. They don’t doubt. They believe. Before I put on my other sock, I’ve doubted the entire day. And my brother writes: “The great revolutionist was found far in advance of his slain foemen, still breathing lightly, and showing on Cataline’s face the indomitable spirit that had animated him when alive.”

The Roman Army carried his severed head back to the Eternal City in a basket.

Once, outside this very room, a jay rammed into the window. Then he backed up and flew into it again. Again. Again. Again, until he finally dropped into the dirt. They say only man is valiant enough to die for lost causes.

In the blue-gray light, Walt Kaplan thinks, My people sleep. My own brother, a man who has faith enough — believes enough — to devote his life to raising an ancient debaucher from the dead, sleeps in leafy Brooklyn beside his squirrelly wife. My Sarah and my daughter sleep across the hall. In sleep, they breathe their finite breaths. The dawn sun claws upward. I sink into carpet. I dream of home when I’m home, of love when I love. How can I shout farewell from the mountaintop if I never leave the house? How can I rise to protect my people if I don’t even own a sword?