Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (9 page)

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Ever since Orville had arrived home there had been a drought, the worst in living memory. Rain, real rain, had been rare. Not only had it been dry, but hot. Now, at the end of October, apples were withering on trees, cows were melting, chickens were going crazy, rabid skunks and raccoons and an odd red fox were attacking even in backyards, cherries were flaccid, peaches were leathery, and grapes were more raisinlike than otherwise. Farmers, often silent, were sullenly so, and farmers' wives were appearing in Bill and Orville's waiting room with the florid trappings of nineteenth-century hysteria and melancholia.

Orville had been fat as a child and by now had pretty much licked it. He had been shocked by how fat Americans had become, the epidemic of overweight. His obese patients found the relentless heat intolerable. Their ailments inflamed, and excoriated. Cigarette sales soared. Whole families would walk into the office puffing away like old-time steam engines, a three-hundred-and-something-pound dad with a fake satin jacket reading “Earl,” a wife tipping the scales well over two-forty reading “Marge,” and two teenage fleshballoons reading “Junior” and “Peg,” all revved up on nicotine. Much like, Orville mused as he treated their phantom complaints, what he and Lily had seen at Disney World during the cousin's wedding in “Wedding Pavilion”—whole tribes of American families dressed like bowling teams, looking like they'd eaten the balls. Nicotine revved them up, but couldn't bring rain.

Orville and Bill were wilting as well. Orville was a man who loved rain, every kind of rain. Holland had been heaven. He loved living below sea level, pummeled daily by precipitation, taking long walks through the tall, straight evergreens outside of Zeist, where the drizzle served up a pine scent so solid you could almost chew it. Parched skies were hard for him. Bill, corralled by Babette, worked fewer hours, seldom taking night call. His care seemed a few degrees off. Orville was constantly repairing his mistakes.

But Celestina was coming. The day after tomorrow. On Monday the 30th Orville would pilot the Chrysler down to JFK to meet her. Her return ticket was open-ended. In their last phone call, the day before yesterday, she had said she might stay the whole year. What an image, he thought. Celestina among the Columbians? Buckle up!

But first he had a party to get through.

“You don't go out!” Penny had decided, and Penny decided was Penny not to be denied. He waited for the blow to fall. She had coaxed him to a dinner party that night at the home of Henry Schooner, who lived in another grand old Victorian, restored perfectly and painted gaily in peach with burgundy trim, and resting exactly 134 strides across the Courthouse Square from Selma's house. The only strange part about his going to Schooner's dinner party was that Henry had been the sadistic bully who had made a good part of Orville's childhood a living hell.

The dinner finished, the guests sat at the table chatting. It was an intimate affair, Penny and Milt, Henry and Nelda Jo, and Orville and the woman Penny had arranged as his “date,” his childhood girlfriend Faith Schenckberg Schmerz, with whom, playing doctor in his basement as the furnace roared and the woodpile stank of rats, he'd had his first public erection. Faith, a religious Jew, wore a low-cut dress and push-em-up bra that brought to Orville's mind the Hebraic phrase “a sunburnt offering.” During dinner Orville had the recurring feeling that his mother was hovering nearby. From time to time, furtively, he would glance up out a window, scanning the sky, but no.

The aged port and top-shelf brandy circulated the mahogany table on rimmed silver trays, and Henry offered real Havana cigars along with a heavy silver cigar cutter. To Orville, the surprising thing was how sophisticated the evening was. He had grown up in a family one generation shy of immigrants who'd had no real tether to the rituals of the Old World and whose take on the New World was ad-driven toward “looks,” the “look” of a car or of an outfit or of a person was the currency. A man was summed up by the size of his neck, a woman by how ugly or lovely she was, as if getting away from the thin necks and ugliness of the
shtetls
of the Old World was more important than finding out the complex truth of the person. For Orville to dine elegantly so close to home was bizarre. And to have this come from
Schooner?
From the kid who, in the soaring vulgarity of the town, had been the most vulgar of all?
Mousse saumon
and
coq au vin
with a
trou
of palate-refreshing raspberry sorbet in between—from sadistic, pornographic, anti-Semitic Schooner, the only kid he knew who was ever expelled from Columbia High.

Orville stared across the table at Schooner, seeing in his bulky body and square face and the neatly combed Andy Warhol–white hair and weird dark eyes—seeing in all this adulthood the same tough kid of twelve with the same block of a body and the same eyes that had filled him with terror. He could not help but see, in the smiling man, the vile boy.

Reflexively Orville found himself fingering a raised nubbin of scar tissue on the back of his neck. When he was twelve, sitting in the front row of a sock hop in the Mount Carmel Church basement watching the girls jitterbug with each other, Orville had felt a sudden searing pain on the back of his neck. Jumping to his feet, turning around, he was face-to-face with a leering Schooner holding the cigarette butt he'd just put out on Orville's neck. Schooner was daring him to do something about it. Bigger, tougher, stronger—first kid on the block with pubic hair, first on the block to sell dirty postcards from Mexico—Henry, seemingly at whim, would chase Orville and beat him up and tell him that if he told his mother or father he would beat him worse the next time. Orville, terrified, had never told. Schooner started extorting money from him for protection.

He remembered Schooner sitting next to him in seventh grade and, during a Studebaker math drill, tapping him on the arm; when Orville looked over he saw Henry's dick laid out on his desktop next to a ruler, and not to solve a math problem either. Another day, Schooner and another thug at Boy Scouts in the Lutheran Church basement dragged Orville into the men's room “to see what a Jew dick looks like.” They pulled down his pants, did their mocking inspection, and, with a threat, let him go.

The worst, in a way, were the basketball games at the Boys' Club on South Third. Orville loved basketball. Schooner played, too, on an opposing team, played like a bull in a china shop, throwing elbows, cracking knees. Orville knew that if Schooner's team lost, Henry would be waiting for him, and so toward the end of games, Orville tried to lose. If it looked like a win, he'd get ready as the clock ticked down, and the final whistle was like a starting pistol at a race and Orville would run like hell through the locker room down the stairs and up Prison Alley toward the Courthouse Square, Schooner chasing. If he was caught, he was extorted and/or beaten.

Downstreet below Fourth was Henry's home turf. He was poor and lived with his father, who worked nights as a security guard at Iron Mountain out near Tivoli. Their tiny house was close by the North Swamp among the poor Italian and Hungarian and Ukrainian immigrants, just a street away from the black section of town, near the Colored Citizens Club. Henry came from the bad part of town, without toys; Orville from the good, with a storeful.

Before Orville had come back last August, the last time he had seen Henry Schooner was more than twenty years ago. Orville had been manager of the league champion Fish Hawk basketball team. The starting five—Whiz the black star, Konopski the tall farmer who played a solid center, Scomparza the kid who could rough 'em up under the boards, Basch the dentist's son who could drill shots from long range, and Tommy Kline of Kline's Whale Oil and Gas who was the sizzling, savvy playmaker—had made it clear to Schooner that if he messed with Orville he was dead meat. The Fish Hawks were hot. Tickets were in demand. Henry Schooner stole a roll of tickets for the big game against Troy and was scalping them. He got caught and was expelled.

The last time he had seen Schooner was when the starting five and Orville, from the steps of the gym, watched Henry trudge away, his refrigerator body moving as if on wheels, his white-blond head unbowed. Just before he walked into the woods on the path that was a shortcut around Kleek's Pond to the rough, impoverished zones of Downstreet, he turned and raised a middle finger at the team, mouthed a “Fuck you!” and disappeared into the woods.

“A toast,” Henry was saying, rising from the table, raising his glass of port. “To Doctor Orville Rose, a welcome home, and to the memory of a fine lady of Columbia, a woman I often looked at as a kid wishing, since I had no mom to speak of, she could've been my mom. I'm talking about your mom, yours and our dear Penny's, Selma Rose.”

“To Orville and Selma Rose!” shouted all.

“A wonderful couple!” shouted Milt.

All eyes turned to Orville for a response. Given a whole childhood of Schooner's threatening him with “If you tell anyone, especially your mother, I'll kill you!” and given the smarminess of the toast that made Orville feel like throwing up the mousse, the coq, the sorbet in between and the two wines, it was only with the greatest discipline that he was able to rise, swallow his revulsion at Schooner's current duplicity, and speak.

“Thank you, Henry. Being back here again after so many years has been, well, sort of great, and I greatly appreciate your kind, great, really, words about my—our—mother. It's been the greatest evening, a really great dinner. Penny and I greatly appreciate it.”

It sufficed. The conversation rolled on. He sat there quietly drinking until Penny, in a lull, visibly perturbed that Orville was silent, said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

“Oh,” Orville said, startled, for he had been in a reverie about Celestina Polo and the twenty tiny chapels set among the cypresses and gravestones on the pilgrimage site on top of the Sacre Monte. “I . . . uh, I was just wondering, why whales?”

“Oh, Christ!” Milt said, in mock horror. “Him and his whales!”

“What about the whales, dahlin'?” asked Nelda Jo. She was a dazzling, elegant blonde from Tulsa, with a nose just a touch too flat. She taught aerobics at Schooner's Spa out on Route 9 near the mall and seemed to have a body made all of pectorals and gluteals, a body that reminded Orville of the female athletes in Zeist and of the women leading the exercise shows on
TV
. She was wearing a silky, casually draped beige dress with a V-neck that both showed a necklace of significant diamonds and two un-bra'd nipples, which seemed, to the slightly drunk Orville, as big as muscat grapes.

Just my luck, he thought. She goes to Dr. Edward R. the Sociopath Shapiro.

“I mean,” Nelda Jo went on, “are we talkin' Moby-damn-Dick?”

“I was wondering, with whales being the logo of Columbia, why
whales?
”

“Oh, I get it,” Nelda Jo said. “You're wondering
why
whales?”

“Columbya wassa whalin' port,” Faith said, slurring her words. “Caught 'em in the river.” Faith had recently come out of a nasty divorce from Mouse Schmerz but had not come out too sober.

“But whales live in seawater, right?” Orville asked. “The river is
freshwater, right?” Everybody said right. “So?” No one knew. The conversation veered back toward the known. Soon Orville got beeped out. Schooner accompanied him to the door.

“I am sensing that you are not comfortable here tonight,” Henry said. “Ever since you've come back, you've been avoiding me, and I just want you to know two things. Number one, I understand why. Number two, I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” Orville said, “I really—”

“No, it is not okay, not okay at all. I have to earn your respect.”

The beeper went off. “Gotta go.”

“It's early. Hope you finish up quick, maybe you can come back?”

“I'll try.”

“I believe it.” Henry was shaking Orville's hand in the way experienced politicians do: one hand in the voter's, the other clasping the elbow in the most friendly way. This reminded Orville of Bill showing him how the old docs also did this to palpate the olecranon fossa of the elbow in unsuspecting patients, searching for nodules of syphilis.

“One more thing,” Henry went on, “before you disappear for your noble rounds?”

“Yeah?”

“People change.”

“Some don't.”

“As Shakespeare said, ‘The past is past.'”

“What he said, Henry,” Orville said, seeing in those eyes the sadist, “is, ‘the past is prologue.'”

“And ‘the play's the thing!' I don't want any more confrontations between the both of us.”

Orville noted the lapse of grammar, the old Schooner slipping out. And then he was surprised to see that Henry was noting his noting something.

“It'll take time, Orvy, to win your respect. I'm game if you are.” Orville said nothing. “We're on the same team now.”

“What team is that?”

“Columbia. America. The world. We're global now.” Schooner smiled. “You know, in the last couple of years I got close to your mom, real close. Great lady.”

Orville had a sickening thought:
he's mailing the letters.

“I'd go over to the house from time to time, look in on her, have a cup of tea, chat. It's okay if you don't come back tonight. It already means a lot that you came at all.”