Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (6 page)

Bill opened a drawer, took out a scallion, and bit into it. “Y'look good, Orvy. Contacts, eh? Thin, too. Been runnin'?” Orville nodded. “Toldja that right knee'd heal without surgery. Bodies almost always'll heal, if you get out of the way and give 'em time.”

“Tincture of time. You taught me that. I've saved a lot of lives doing as much nothing as possible.”

“Seen Amy yet?”

“Penny won't let me. Not unless I take this deal of my mom's.”

“Yeah, I heard about her will—everybody in town did, I reckon. You'd be crazy, even with the cash. But you should see Amy. Our little miracle's become quite the thespian. Got the lead in a Shakespearean play at camp 'n' all. Too bad Penny won't let you see her before you leave.” As if with reluctance, and difficulty, Bill rose. His hand on Orville's shoulder, he ushered him to the stained-glass door marked
OUT
.

“Sorry about that rumor, Bill—”

“Yeah, well, lotta rumors. Only person who really knows what's goin' on around here is me. People tell the truth in here. Fella like me gets to lift up the lid, peek in under the edge, see past the bullshit and—” Bill coughed hard and had trouble catching his breath. Orville recognized the wheeze and gurgle of congestive heart failure.

“Got my nitros right here.” He took out a pillbox, fumbled, and spilled all the pills onto the floor. Bill stared down at them as if they were lost in the deep. He tried to bend down but couldn't.

Orville squatted and searched them out, one by one, on the worn linoleum. He was hit hard by the sight of those pointy-toed Italian shoes now tattered and scuffed and, where one trouser cuff had ridden up, the alarming way one puffy ankle was ballooning way out over the elastic top of a black sock. Heart failure big-time. Corralling the nitros, Orville wondered what would have happened if he hadn't been there. He handed Bill the pills and asked if he had a doctor of his own. Bill smiled sheepishly.

“A doctor who treats himself,” Orville said, “has a fool for a patient.”

“Gotta be a fool . . . ,” he wheezed, “t'stay here . . . long's I did. I'm leavin' . . . th'day after tomor—” He was too breathless to go on. His hand on Orville's shoulder went from being supportive to needing support. The nails dug in.

“Open your mouth,” Orville said. Bill did. Whoa, those scallions! “Tongue up, scallion breath!” He popped a nitro under Bill's tongue. They waited.

Bill began breathing easier, and then smiled. “Good luck t'you, son. Say hi to Italy for me—never been, myself.”

His hand on Orville's shoulder lightened and the
OUT
door was opening and there was that ushering out and then the door shut with a well-worn
click,
and Orville found himself in the dark hallway, unsure whether to go back or leave.

He waited, half-fearing he'd hear the body drop. But then he heard the
IN
door click open for the next patient. How can I leave him turning in this circle, old and sick and alone?

Out on the street, smacked by the remorseless dead weight of the wet summer heat, he realized that he might just have seen this old man for the last time.

· 5 ·

Later that afternoon Penny and Orville sat together on a bench in the Courthouse Square, facing Selma's old turreted Victorian. In front of the large Greek revival courthouse, a Columbian in dark green work clothes and a baseball cap graced with a grinning spouting whale was diddling an American flag to come down.

Orville was sipping George Dickel on ice. The bourbon and the jet lag made him woozy. He had tried to call Celestina Polo, to tell her what the situation was at home and that his flight would arrive in Milan the morning after the day after tomorrow. Getting no answer at her apartment in Rome, he remembered that she had said, on parting, that she would be on retreat in some Ayurvedic Buddhist
center in Biella, west of Lake Orta. She had written the name and number down, but he had lost it. Try as he might, he couldn't recall it. He missed her desperately. At the airport he'd told her that he had quit his job in Holland and was going to move to Rome to work as a doctor and make a future there with her. She cried and hugged him insanely hard. They'd stayed that close, heart to heart, until he boarded the plane. He could feel her with him even now.

He stared at the Columbian yanking at the flag, which was now stuck halfway down the pole. Orville sent out a thought toward the man:
Yank it harder!
The man yanked it harder.
Harder!
The man yanked it harder. The rope broke. The flag fluttered down. The man ran to catch it, but it caught him instead, shrouding him. He thrashed and then surfaced, crying out “Shit!”—which echoed off the granite facade of the courthouse and off Selma's house and then the post office—“Shit! . . . Shit shit . . .” and scurried after itself down Fourth across Washington to hit the limestone face of the library, “shit.”

“What would be so bad about staying and helping Bill?” Penny asked.

“It would be lethal.”

“But Columbia's changed, Orvy. The New Yorkers are coming. We've got cultural events up the wazoo. Street fairs, even. It'd be over before you knew it.”

“Pen, look.” He showed her the watch Celestina had given him, with the
NOW
s instead of the numbers. “My whole life in this town—in this country, even—was spent looking ahead, looking for what's next. I don't want anything to be over before I know it—ever again. 'Cause that's what's lethal. For two years I've been free. The last three months, for the first time since the disaster with Lily, I've been in love, and I'm damn well not going to screw that—”

“Love? With who?”

“An Italian woman, Celestina Polo.”

“Nice name. Tell me all about it.”

He told her a lot about it, the romance, their plans, Celestina's work.

“Don't you just
love
all this New Age stuff?” she said. “We've got shiatsu
out in the mall on Route 9 now, can you imagine?” His heart sank. “I can't wait to meet her. If you stay, she can come.” Orville rolled his eyes. “Okay, then we'll go over there. Milt and I did Tuscany three years go. It's so gorgeous you could die. And the pasta!”

“What do you know about Mom's letter?”

“What letter, hon?” He told her. “What? She wrote you a letter, and someone mailed it now?”

“Penny, it's very important that you don't hold this back from me—for the sake of you and me in the future. Is it you? Did she give you this letter to mail?”

“I swear to God,
Baruch atooh
and all that, that I know nothing about this, that it wasn't me, that the first I heard about it was right now. I promise.”

“On Amy's soul?”

“On Amy's soul.”

Orville knew that Penny, like Selma and even him, was superstitious, especially around Judaism, things like souls. Selma was always touching wood or throwing salt over her shoulder or, if she had to go back into the house after forgetting something, sitting and counting to ten before she left again. At times it seemed almost Kabbala. So he knew that Penny was telling the truth. She knew nothing about the letter.

“Thanks.”

“Welcome, but I can't believe this! She wrote you a letter?”

“A number of letters. She said I'd be hearing from her from time to time during the year and thirteen days.”

“So she wrote a bunch and somebody's got them and will be mailing them?”

“Anonymously. The first one had a Columbia postmark. Any idea who?”

“Could be a friend, maybe Minky Schenckberg. I can ask.”

“No. Swear to me that you won't. I can't stand anyone else knowing.” Orville was adamant. “Swear?”

“I swear.” Penny thought for a moment. “What did she say?”

“Nothing much. Kind of chatty. Critical. The usual.”

“Critical of me, too?”

“No. Even after her death, dear sister, you are a saint. Critical only of me.”

“Yeah, well, I had a different relationship with her,” Penny said. “Maybe because I didn't resist her as much—at least not face-to-face—and I never really left her, never went as far away. All the way to Syracuse? And then Dublin? I only went to Albany with Milt—until she convinced him to come back here.”

“You know, when I'd come home from Syracuse to visit, she'd keep a record in her diary, by the phone in the kitchen—‘Time Orvy Arrived, Time Orvy Departed'—and at the end of the visit she'd announce the total hours and minutes I'd been home. And when I was there, if I got up from her burned brisket to go out with my friends, she acted like I'd plunged a knife into her heart. She'd wait up until I came home. The drives back to Syracuse were murder. I felt like the worst son on earth. The guilt. Once, when I'd left her weeping her heart out, I couldn't stand it. I got as far as Catskill before I turned around. But when I walked back in she was on the phone with Minky, laughing, telling her what a great visit she'd had with me. She stared at me, puzzled, and asked why I'd come back.”

Penny nodded. “I know. I always saw the difference between the ‘Public Selma'—pillar of the community, proud mother of two great kids—and the ‘Private Selma'—all
tsuris
and blame. But she was never as vicious to me. We reached an accord.”

“Lucky you. When she put me on the train to go to Dublin for medicine, her last words to me were, ‘
I
want that degree!'” Penny laughed.

He then told her about the last time he'd seen Selma, two years ago as he was leaving for Europe for good. They'd sat in the living room—now empty of Sol's toy king laugh and signature tag at the end of his rare statements, “and so forth.” That afternoon, Orville had opened up to Selma, telling her that his marriage to Lily was over.

“Lily never really loved you, honey-bunny,” Selma had said. “I always knew that.”

Orville's head had imploded. Sand rushed in. His belly went all watery. That was Selma: if you opened yourself up a crack, she would disembowel you. Guts on his shoe tops, he shut up. The grandfather clock ticked . . . tocked.

“Total selfishness,” she had announced. “The thing about you, Orville, is your total selfishness.”

“Thanks for sharing, Mom,” he had said, getting up to go.

“Why didn't you invite me to New Jersey for your thirtieth birthday? You had a big celebration, I hear, and you didn't invite
me?
Your mother?”

“I didn't want a party,” he said, asking himself, Is there no statute of limitations on imagined slights? “But Lily went ahead anyway.”

“But it was your birthday
.
A milestone. Thirty is a definite milestone.”

“It was
my
birthday, Mom!”

“Maybe,” she said indignantly, “but
I
did it.”

He got up to go.

She sighed, the sound of some large object collapsing into something deep. “Any words of wisdom for me?”

All he could think of was Sol's favorite expression, which was, in fact, a kind of wisdom. “It never rains on a golf course?”

At that Selma wept, out of her one good eye. When Selma was in her forties, she'd been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor, an acoustic neuroma. In taking it out, the neurosurgeon had cut a facial nerve. One side of her face went dead, disfiguring her. “It kills me,” she'd said, that last day with him, “to cry out of only one eye.”

Gutted, Orville wanted desperately to go to her, put his arm around her, hug her as any good son—any normal son—might to comfort his mother in her pain. He could not. Everything in him tried to get his feet to move toward her, but stiff-faced, he moved away. He left.

“I failed her,” he said now to Penny. “I was never enough for her.”

“Tell me about it. Back here, seeing her every day took its toll. I drove to Albany twice a week for years for therapy. The way Mom was, it's amazing we're not both on Stelazine.”

“
You're
not on Stelazine?”

“You
are?
”

“Just joking.”

“Oh you sto-op!” She punched his arm playfully. Then she, too, sighed, scarily like Selma. “Leaving's so easy, and staying's so hard.”

“I've done enough hard things for one lifetime—”

“Tell it to Amy.”

“Let me see her and I will. You're acting just like Mom.”

“Don't start, don't you dare! This isn't about her anymore. It's about me and you and your family. Our family. Our very little family here in our godforsaken shitty little—as you put it—lethal town.”

“I thought you said it had changed.”

“Well, it's still
kind
of lethal, but c'mon, kid. Stop angst-ing around. Try it.”

“Dream on.”

“I don't, that well,” Penny said sadly. “You were always our dreamer.”

“If I stay, she wins.”

“You've got it ass-backwards.”

“If I stay, she loses?”

“If you run, she wins. You confirm her idea that you're a bad son, so she wins. And so do Milt and I, financially.”

He stared at her. “You'd rather have the money, wouldn't you?”

“Milt would. I would not, no.”

“Yeah, I believe that.” He got up to go. “Celestina has your phone number. If she calls, please don't tell her anything about any of this. Just get her number and tell her to call me at Selma's.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks.” He walked across the street and into the house.

Between the jet lag and the bourbon he was asleep on the couch by seven that evening. Sometime around two in the morning, he sat bolt upright, sure that someone was there. Not seeing anyone, he tiptoed through each bare, clean room. Nothing.

He found himself in the seven-sided turret overlooking the square, his childhood bedroom. The room was empty, the floor freshly urethaned. Looking around, Orville was overwhelmed by a sense of barrenness, a sense of all that had happened in this room that had been lonely and sad and crazy. He backed up against a wall as if for protection, but felt dizzy, as though he were balancing on tilting planes of a recurrent childhood nightmare. He closed his eyes and slid down the wall to the floor, grabbing his knees and pulling them up to his chest. He thought of all the hours, all the years he'd spent alone in this room in this town.

What a waste. What a damn waste.

A desperate sadness filled his chest and rose in his throat. His heart beat fast and his mind went shallow, like a lake at night or a field in winter. The shallowness ran to the horizon. Blinking, he looked again around the empty room, recalled the lonely effort to understand without being understood. He felt the losses, the loss of the possibility of being brave and daring rather than shy, of being a believer instead of a cynic, of being loving rather than being—at those key moments of closest approach to anyone—awash in dread.

“Barren,” he whispered, and in the empty urethaned heptagon a faint echo overlapped his whispering “barren” again.

“Who's barren, honey-bunny?”

He jumped, looked around. She was hovering outside at the level of the second-story turret window, one hand resting on the golden ball on top of the flagpole. Once again wearing the cobalt-blue gown with hair and makeup in the style of the early '50s: black eyebrow pencil, blue mascara, red rouge, and lipstick the scarlet of those pesky little bleeders you get in scalp lacerations. And her face was beautiful! Unmutilated. It was Selma before the operation. She hovered, an expectant look on her face, waiting for an answer.

He blinked, shook himself, looked away, then looked back. Still there. He walked closer to the window. She let go of her hold on the flagpole and floated up and down slightly, as if on ripples of the breeze. Had he gone crazy? He knew from his doctoring that the bereaved often have visions of the dead in the weeks and months following the death—not only visions but conversations, as if they were really present. “Presences,” they sometimes called them. Should I talk to her? Why not? Maybe, dead, she'll be nicer?

“
This
is barren,” he said, gesturing around the room, and in as conversational a tone as he could muster. “All of this. My life here.”

“Now wait a sec, Mr. Big Shot.
We
weren't barren. Sol and I raised two kids, one very successful, and you, well, moderately successful. One grandchild. We waited for a grandchild from you, but oh no, not you, you just wouldn't give us one. Not even
one!
The barren one is
you.
”

“Go away,” he said.

“I am away.”

“Leave me alone.”

“That's not how it works.”

“How does it work?”

“You leave
me
alone! I gave my life to you and your sister and now you run away again? Just like your whole life. Run away from love. Run, run, run. Runaway. And then you sit here in your old room mooning around about yourself? Total selfishness. I mean, did I sweeten the pie or what? Sol's hard-earned dollars, the very lovely home, the customized New Yorker with only thirty-four thousand and some miles on it?
Oy gevalt!
”