Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (4 page)

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“Mom did
what?
” Orville shouted.

“Calm down,” said his sister, Amelia “Penny” Sarah Rose Plotkin.

“Unbelievable! Barbarian! Selma the Visigoth! I'm outta here! I'm catching the next train back to Italy.”

“You'll be rich. You're broke, you're drowning in debt—”

“I'd rather be dead.” Orville struggled to free himself from the soft sofa. “Good-bye and good luck.”

“Very rich,” said Milt, Penny's husband. “In a year and thirteen days.”

The three of them had settled deeply into the furniture of Penny and Milt's sunken living room, a sanctuary on a southwestern theme done all in “biscuit” and “Navajo White,” a beige kiva
.
Plastic vinyl runners protected the white carpet in the high-traffic zones. Penny, he realized, had become almost as much of a neat freak as their mother. At the end of his marriage to Lily, Orville had lived in such a house in New Jersey, complete with—the phrase had become a derisive mantra for him—“clean guest towels for clean guests.”

Orville, Penny, and Milt talked about the sad event of Selma's death, comforting themselves that the end was merciful: a massive heart attack while cleaning the kitchen floor in her house on Courthouse Square. It brought back their father, Sol's, death a decade ago, he, too, felled by a heart attack, again mercifully, after a massive swing in a tight match on the sixteenth hole of the Catskill Country Club, a tricky par three over a brook and up a tough hill to an undulating green. Brother and sister agreed that in the time since his death, their father had mellowed, and both children now had mostly happy memories of him. Sol, the “Toy Store King,” seemed more present in death than he had ever been in life.

“How rich?” Orville now asked, having climbed up out of the arroyo of the living room to the vinyl runner on the ridge leading toward the door.

“Adding all assets,” Milt said, “almost a cool mil.”

“Okay, I'll stay.” They stared at him. “A joke. Where the hell did she get that kind of money?”

“It helps to be the only toy store in town for forty years,” Penny said. “Dad sold a lot of toy airplanes.”

“And the Jolly Jews made a killing,” Milt said, happily. The Jolly Jews had been Sol's investment and poker club. “Y'know how they always say that if you'd of only put ten grand into conservative stocks and waited forty years you'd make a bundle? They did, and they did. And the last coupla years, with Reagan, you'd have to be a chimpanzee to not get rich. It's like a miracle around here, how the New Yorkers have discovered Columbia. They'll snap at anything! Especially the artsy-fartsy crowd, setting up antique stores in the danger zones down below Fourth. They come up here to get away from the gunfire and drugs in New York City; we sell 'em a piece of crappy storefront where they can live upstairs and what do they find? Gunfire and drugs!” Milt laughed so hard he seemed to cramp up. “We get a lot of gays. Pretty soon the three meccas for the gays will be 'Frisco, Fire Island, and Columbia.”

Orville stared at his brother-in-law. The tall body had gotten pudgy now, and the pink Ralph Lauren shirt stretched the polo player over significant male breasts. Milt had always played tennis, and the crisp white shorts were now cutting into legs more flabby than Orville recalled. Milt had been discovered by Selma through the synagogue sisterhood Hadassah. Penny, a senior at Columbia High, was in love with Polonia Scomparza, a nice boy but goyim
.
Milt saved the day. He came from Albany, an hour upriver, and was hell-bent on becoming a certified public accountant like his dad. At first, Milt had always seemed braced for pain, yet chatty. Now, around Penny, he seemed pain free but as silent as Sol had been around Selma.

In the past few years Milt had been less an accountant and more, in his words, “a man in development.” He was making money, and money was making him. Bald, with a half-smile resting on his moon-face that widened to a laugh, making his eyes happy slits and his big head roll this way and that in wonderment at life's riches, Milt now seemed happy. Finally, Orville thought, the wolf of failure has been driven from his door. Here before me is a success. Dealing all his life with a sense of his own failure, Orville now looked at Milt with an electric fascination, asking himself, How the fuck has he done it? What the hell has happened to the concept of America as a meritocracy?

The terms of Selma's will had a certain elegance. Half went to Penny. The other half, and the family house and car, went to Orville.

There was a catch.

Orville got the money, the house, and the car only if he lived in the house continuously for one year and thirteen days, starting on the day he arrived home. “Why the extra thirteen days?” he asked Penny and Milt. No one knew. The house was a nineteenth-century Victorian sitting on Courthouse Square in the town center. The car was an elephantine '81 Chrysler New Yorker—“The biggest Chrysler makes,” Milt said. “Your trunk space is amazing.”

Staring down at his sister and brother-in-law from the vinyl runner, Orville said, “Live
here?
Live
here?”

“We do.”

“I'd die in a month. It's blackmail. How could she do this to me?”

“I believe, Orville Abraham,” Penny said, “she did it out of love.”

“Did you know about this?”

“No. It was news to me too.”

“And if I leave?”

“You get nothing.”

“Who gets my almost-mil?”

Penny looked to Milt. Milt looked to Penny.

“
All
of it? The whole other almost-mil? You get my mil?”

“Nowadays,” Milt said, “a mil doesn't go all that far.”

“Let me be clear,” Penny said. “We'd rather have you here than have your money. Right, Milt?”

“Oh, sure,” Milt said. “Sure, sure. You're family. Sure.”

“And if I go, what happens to the house?”

“It sits there empty for a year and thirteen days,” Penny said. “It can't be sold or rented. Then Milt and I get it and we can sell it.”

“And the car, too,” Milt said. “The New Yorker.”

“The house just sits there empty for a year?”

“Hayley keeps cleaning it and Buzzy keeps fixing it.”

“No dice. I'll stay out the week, to see you guys and Amy.”

“No, you won't,” Penny said.

“What do you mean I won't?”

“Amy's away at drama camp. Her first overnight camp and it's
killing
me!” Penny took out a hankie, started to cry. “I will not let you see her unless you're staying.”

“She's my niece! She's my special—“

“She's my daughter, and I will not subject her to your comings and goings at this time of our grief. You know how close she was to Mom. I mean, she's taking it well—sometimes I think she's the most mature one in the whole family—but when we couldn't even find you, she got that look in her eye and said, ‘It's like Orvy's dead, too.' She's doing okay at camp, but it just about killed me between not having Mom anymore and your not answering my telegram and calls and sending her off. . . .” Penny blew her nose, an astounding
hroonnnk!
She looked up at Orville and said, “I figured you'd say no to this. But this time, for once, I'm being smart. I'm cutting my losses.”

“Wait. After we spoke last night—you didn't even
tell
Amy that you'd found me?”

“If you had a child, you would understand.”

Orville felt as if he'd been punched in the gut. He rocked back on his heels, seeing in his sister the same genius for hurt their mother had. Penny was staring at him, chin up in self-righteousness. Orville's gaze fixed on her neck, on the prominent wrinkles encircling it; the swan's neck that when she was a young woman had been her pride and joy, to be shown off with a collection of necklaces that outstripped even Selma's; a neck that, always uncovered down past Tuesday, helped deflect attention from her slightly too long, too narrow face, her thin lips, her brown eyes set slightly too close to the nose. Her neck was now partly hidden by a high-ruffled black Victorian blouse. The skin never lies. Her connective tissue was going. He read in this woman of forty-four the skin of a sixty-year-old. She's too thin now, eaten with anxiety, and as nervous as a small bird. His eyes traveled back across her body and medical history to her overcheery girlhood in this overdepressing backwater, where culture was a yearly piano recital at the junior high by someone from out of town who was an unknown about to become a has-been, and where the nearest nice Jewish boy was an hour upriver in Albany.

And so Orville shifted, hearing in her voice, however vicious, the voice of his mostly helpful big sister, and his rage eased and he smiled.

Penny, too, awakened by her anger, suddenly saw her little brother more fully, these two years on. She thought he looked younger, more handsome, healthier, slimmer, with a dynamite tan. She noted that he was no longer wearing glasses.

“Contacts?” she asked, smiling. He nodded. “You look great, Orvy. Mom would've been proud—I mean, of your looks.”

“Partly proud. Let us not forget The Incident of the Other Necktie.”

Penny laughed. One Chanukah several years ago, Selma had given Orville two neckties. He went upstairs and came back down wearing one. She took a look, sighed, and said, “You didn't like the
other
necktie?”

“Partly proud maybe,” Penny said. “So listen, kid, why not stay?”

“What the hell would I do for a year? Watch
TV
? Play golf?”

“Golf,” Milt said sagely, “is good.”

This comment led up a narrowing wash to dead silence. Orville noticed that Penny was grinning, and he knew it wasn't because of what Milt had said.

“What?” he asked. “C'mon, c'mon.”

“Oh, nothing. I just remembered something. Bill asked after you.”

And then Orville got it. Bill Starbuck, the aging town doctor, had been the one who'd led him into medicine.

“Oh, no,” Orville said, backing away, his hands warding her off as if she were a ghost or were pointing a gun—or were a ghost with a gun. “You wouldn't, you didn't!”

“You'd be great, Orvy.”

“Nice try, kid.” He shouldered his backpack. “If you won't let me see Amy, I'm outta here now.”

“I won't, but you can't leave now. There's no train 'til morning.”

“I'll sleep on a park bench.” He opened the door.

“You're welcome to bed down in our home, stranger,” said Milt.

“Wait!” Penny said. Orville waited, his back still turned. “Here.” She came up, slipped two keys into the palm of his hand. “The keys to the house and the car. I'll run you down.”

Orville stared at her, then Milt. “Milt, I've got a question for you.”

“Fire away.”

“Why whales?”

“Huh?”

“Why all the whales, on the banner and the street signs and all?”

“Oh, because whales are the logo for our revival, for
SPOUT
.”

“Yeah, I know. But why whales?” No response. “Why Columbia
and whales?”

“Oh. Well, Columbia was built on whales. They used to catch 'em in the river.”

“But whales live in the sea.
Sea
water. The Hudson's a river.
Fresh
water?”

“Oh. . . . Dunno. But I'll tell you one thing I do know, as a developer. They work. Those whales work. Those whales are putting us on the damn map.”

Sometime after midnight Orville found himself wandering around the cleaned-out, cleaned-up, urethaned old house of his childhood. It had grown small, an
Alice in Wonderland
house of tiny rooms, stairs, windows, and toilets. On the kitchen table he found a letter, addressed to him in his mother's hand and postmarked “Columbia, August 13.”

It had been mailed yesterday, two weeks after her death.

To calm himself, he sought out his sanctuary, the flat tin roof. There, amid his friends the trees—the larch, the maple, the copper beech—under what as a child he'd secretly held to be sure signs of that something else, the stars, he clicked on a flashlight and opened the envelope. He set aside a thick old document and opened her letter. Handwritten, it was undated.

Dear son,

2
A.M.
We old people don't sleep well. Strange to get a letter from a dead person, but such is life. You've been out gallivanting around Europe, but even though the apron strings are cut, I'm holding on for your good. The terms of my will will have upset you, but such is life. I did it so you'd come back to your roots, find someone, grow up and settle down. It's a two-by-two world—
unfortunately
. Penny grew up and settled down nicely, but oh no not you, not Mr. Bigshot Ornery oh no. Bet you're still not socialized, still don't know how to have fun. You can say no and go away again but you lose a lot of equity if you do. I'm offering you a way to live you never would otherwise. When your father dragged me here from the city in '46 I was appalled. The only two things Columbia values are money and mediocrity. But here you are
known
. You're just like me: shy and superstitious, but always leaning
into
life.