Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (10 page)

The funny thing, Orville thought in the emergency room, trying to deal with the carnage of a Saturday night in Columbia, is that Schooner seemed to have meant it.

Doctoring tipsily is like tightrope walking without a net. As Orville popped a peppermint Lifesaver and revived a teenage girl overdosed on her mom's Valium and Barbados rum, he tried to wrestle his mind into balance.

He moved on to a hysterical Mrs. Len Date, wife of the Columbia town lawyer. Len had come home drunk. Mrs. Len had confronted him in the driveway, berating him until she noticed, in the bed of his pickup truck, the severed head of a woman. The rest of the woman was soon found by troopers in a sharp curve of a road way out past Omi. Orville sedated Mrs. Len and went next to tend to a three-year-old boy with a popcorn kernel stuck in his ear.

The kid was screaming. Orvy tried to be nice. He let the anxious young mother hold the scared boy as he tried to pick the kernel out with a probe. No go. Then he tried to suck it out with a sucker, also with no luck. He tried this and that, the kid increasingly frantic and wailing, the mother trying to hold him steady. At that moment Orville felt the whole world of care turn, the way it does when things go wrong and the Emergency Gods are angry. He got frustrated, irritated, and called for a nurse to strap the screaming, flailing kid down to a papoose board so he could get a better take on the ear. The mother objected. Other patients were piling up. The emergency room was taking on a surreal feel, with word of another car crash on the way in. Disasters were waiting and more were brewing out there and the Great Doctor Rose couldn't get the damn popcorn kernel out of the kid's ear, and everybody was getting nasty, including him.

“Hi there, little tyke, heh heh.”

It was Bill, shuffling in toward the bedside, putting a hand on the mother's shoulder and a hand on Orville's, and breathing scallion into the air.

“What're you doing here?” Orville asked, but then realizing that the head nurse must have called him.

“Me? Oh, I got this popcorn kernel stuck in my ear . . . Heh heh. Hi, Gloria,” Bill said to the mother and then, waving a red teddy bear at the boy, said, “Hi there, Benji boy. Got a red teddy for you here.” The boy stopped screaming and reached for it. “Y'know, Gloria, one of the hardest things in doctorin' is getting a popcorn kernel out of a kid's ear. It can get very frustratin', right, Dr. Rose?”

Orville bristled, feeling a hit of criticism. But then, feeling the warmth of Bill's hand on his shoulder, as if now the hand itself were telling him—“Take it easy, it's just a damn popcorn kernel”—he relaxed, and said, “Very.”

“Want me to take a shot at it?” Bill offered.

“Be my guest.”

Bending over the ear, he took out of his pocket a homemade chrome and rubber thing and, still playing with the kid and the red teddy, worked the ear and with a whispering plucking sound like a string of a harp, out came the popcorn kernel. Orville was amazed, and was about to ask how the hell he'd done it when he got called away to attend to the car crash. Refreshed by Bill's caring and skill, he took care with the victims, none of whom was badly hurt. He spoke to the families, glad to bring them good news. The Emergency Gods had come through.

After one in the morning, he walked out of the hospital and guided the Chrysler with its liquid power steering back down to Courthouse Square. Across the way, the party was still going strong. The porch light cast an amber glow, the house was alight. Peals of laughter scurried through the tiny holes in the screen door out into the warm fall night.

Should I go back? Orville wondered, as he pulled into his mother's drive. No.

Not feeling sleepy, he got a beer and came back out and sat on the porch. In the hot, still night, a kind of Indian summer's Indian summer, a last batch of confused crickets sang out as if there were no tomorrow—which might well be, for them. Staring across the way at the party, Orville was unwilling to join in again, yet unable to get his mind off Henry Schooner.

Henry was a mirror image of Gatsby—his past known, his present mysterious. Orville knew that Schooner had walked into the woods and joined the navy, had risen like a rocket, done tours in Vietnam, gotten his high school degree, had gone on to college and business school, and, in his own words, “had played a significant role in clandestine activities, national intelligence and security.” Just after Orville left America two years ago, Schooner returned home to Columbia with a dynamite wife of some wealth with a dancer's body that wouldn't quit, and two young boys, Henry Jr. and Max, both thick-bodied and blond, two compact refrigerators of the same brand.

He bought one of the most expensive houses in town, on the most elegant square, and with a team of Filipinos renovated it to period elegance in record time with no breakages. Two Filipinos stayed on, husband and wife, and did all the childcare and household chores. At dinner parties they cooked fine meals in many cuisines of the world and, in stiff-starched white, served them. In addition to Schooner's Spa, Henry had formed a company with Milt—Schooner and Plotkin, Developers—which was making a fortune. Word was out among New Yorkers that these were the people to see, not only for property but for financing and all the little extras that Schooner, well-connected on every level, could provide. Schooner and Plotkin were heavy into
SPOUT
. Henry was now a pillar of the community, on the boards of the hospital and a bank, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and Episcopal Church, and an alderman.

“My alderman?” Orville said aloud now to himself. “That jerk is my alderman?”

“What's wrong with that, Mr. Bigshot Doctor? He's goyim, but nice.”

Selma was floating low over the front walk, just off the edge of the porch, dressed in a yellow golf skirt, red blouse, and pink hat with a purple tuft on the top. She carried a golf club, maybe a wedge.

“You?”

“Yes, and you did a nice job up there at the hospital, though let's face it, with that mother and her son you could have been a
lot
nicer. Try a little tenderness, will you? I know it's hard for someone like you, but try.”

“Did you give your letters to Henry to mail? Is he the one?”

“Letters?
Moi?
” She smiled coquettishly, a full smile—her facial nerve hadn't yet been cut, or had healed after death. “Adios, bubbula! Fore!” She flew up, up, and away.

Orville sat on the porch staring at the dark sky into which she'd vanished. Warm laughter from Schooner's snapped him back to his senses. Suddenly he felt lonely, left out.

He walked across the square back to the party, and found them all in the oak-paneled den. Burnished, tasteful, costly antiques furnished the room. Henry was standing in front of the mantelpiece. Something had changed. Instead of everyone talking with everyone, everyone was listening to Schooner. All attention was being paid to him. More than attention. The others were rapt, awed. Even Faith, who was swaying, but listening. What was going on?

World affairs was going on. Someone would ask about the recent terrorist bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that had killed 250 soldiers. Schooner had done a tour of duty in Beirut, and answered, “Our nation is the greatest force for good in history. The bad guys can't stand it. Thus, this tragedy of the peacekeepers—our brave fighting men.” Two days after the bombing, the president announced that American armed forces had invaded Grenada. Many Americans thought that the rapidly aging patriarch must have misspoken. Surely he meant that they invaded Lebanon
.
An easy mixup, Lebanon, Grenada. Three syllables, sound a lot the same, no one really knew where either of them were. But no, Grenada it was, wherever it was. And Schooner knew exactly where Grenada was, from his tour of duty in the region: “a small island in the Caribbean with a dangerous pro-Castro Communist faction building an airstrip.”

Schooner's answers were calm, expert, humble, brief, sure, and telegenic. Clearly he had been touched by the magic of
TV
. He had, in fact, been on
TV
several times, commenting on the crisis. He was now a
TV
personality. Parlaying his recent links to national security and intelligence, Schooner had become an authority and a star.

All five of us, Orville realized, are deferring to him.

He seemed bigger, taller, in command. Orville could almost see tiny flecks of glitter, the glitter of fame bestowed in the studio by the
TV
camera, as sometimes you see bright glitter on a woman's cheek the morning after a party. With a sense of horror Orville understood that the next time Schooner was on
TV
there would be a redoubling of this process, more magic TV dust would anoint him, leaving more left to rub off here at home in person. Schooner would be even more a person to be listened to than before.

And if someone in the group disagreed, well, Henry would take this in and gently but surely turn it to his cause.

This went on until Nelda Jo said, “They want old Henry to run for Congress this year, but I said only if he buys me a Ferrari and a week in Venice, Italy, and the boys one 37-inch
TV
each for their rooms.”

“Do you take Visa?” Henry asked.

Everyone roared.

“Why Congress?” Milt asked. “Why not the whole enchilada?”

“Damnright,” Faith slurred, “runfer the goddamn Wide House.”

Henry considered this. “Maybe, someday. My job now is to help our sweet little hometown. Let's face it, my friends, we in Columbia have problems. The mayor, the other day, said to us aldermen that Columbians are
CAVE
people, you know
C-A-V-E
?”

The dinner guests asked what did these letters stand for?

“Citizens Against Virtually Everything!” Laughter. “We all got our work cut out for us. And nobody knows that better than our good doctor. He sees the worst of us, and he's tryin' like hell, with that great old guy Bill Starbuck, to make us better.”

The party broke up. Orville was impressed at how well the Schooners ended their party, disengaging slowly with just the right words, as if they never wanted their guests to leave. Henry suggested to Milt and Penny that they bring their kids and guns out to the Federation of Polish Sportsmen's Club for a turkey shoot and barbecue again soon.

“You've got guns?” Orville asked Penny, startled.

“You got to, the way things are. We're trying to get Amy interested, but she's in between the Schooner boys and won't play with either.” A knowing glance. “Yet.”

“Milt, too?” Orville said, stunned.

“Just a deer rifle, for hunting season,” Milt said. “And a 9-millimeter pistol.”

“Jews with guns,” Orville said indignantly. “What's wrong with this picture?”

“Tell it to an Israeli!” Milt cried out drunkenly. “Talk about tough mothers. Two eyes for an eye! Teeth for a tooth! Never again!”

Faith tugged hard at Orville's arm, making him lose his balance and sending him into a floor-to-ceiling heavy antique breakfront, which wobbled ominously as if it, too, were loaded and about to crash to the floor.

“Whoa! Dangerous!” Orville said. “An accident waiting to happen. You oughta get that trued up, Henry.”

“Thanks, Doc!” Henry said delightedly. “My man will see to it tomorra.”

Wobbly himself from the booze, Orville dimly felt Faith pressed tightly to him out on the porch, everybody saying good night to the excellent Schooners.

“Henry,” Orville said mockingly, “you're a great American.”

“Thanks, old friend,” Henry said, taking it as a compliment. “Can't tell you how much it means to me and my family that you're back home, and that you came to our home tonight. It's a start, a good start, and I look forward to keepin' this friendship goin'.”

“Come back 'n' see us, Doctor,” Nelda Jo said, hugging Orville hard, so that he felt those grapes pressing through her thin fabric and his thin shirt, muscats set in breasts firm as mangoes. “Or I'll be all over you like white on rice!”

“Works for me,” Orville heard himself reply.

“Be good, you two!” Schooner called out.

“Be bad!” Nelda Jo called out after them. “Go for it! Feel the burn!”

As he walked across the square holding up Faith, Orville looked back at Henry and Nelda Jo, side by side, arms around each other under that golden globe of a porch light, waving them on to good luck in sex.

Orville was horny and drunk, Faith drunk and willing. But no. Celestina was way too much with him. He put Faith in Penny's old bed, he in his own. His last thoughts, as boozy sleep slid down over him like a big eyelid over the day: I'm a young man with a bright future hidden somewhere in my past. It's hard to be a doctor for a town that you despise. And why in the world does Henry Schooner care about earning my respect?

· 8 ·

Honey-bunny,

Hiya! How are you? I imagine I'm fine. Heaven can't be worse than life, can it? I can't imagine I'm in Hell.

By now you've settled in, so you and I can get comfy and talk. Your sister always talked to me, except when she was going through her adolescent phase with that Scomparza boy—Catholic, but nice. But you never did. Here's a question: Why, in all the photos Sol took of the family, you're never smiling? He always said things to make us smile, the usual “Say cheese” or one of his dumb jokes. Never worked on you, oh no. Were you depressed? Just thought I'd ask.

By now I bet you've got a girl. My guess and hope is that the lucky one is Rebecca Shapiro, sister of the nice young doctor. Not the most attractive girl, but smart. It takes a special kind of girl to become a CPA don't you agree? Her brother the doctor told me she's a tiger in bed, so you might look into her. Tigress. But I tigress. I hope you find a nice Jewish girl—except that Faith Schenckberg! Do not—repeat—do not mess with her. Jewish, but a tramp. For once, listen to me. Like with dessert: do not indulge.

Orville put down the letter in disgust, his head throbbing. It was eleven Sunday morning, the day after the Schooner party. He felt like shit. His tongue felt like an army had marched across it during the night, and his head like it was now marching through his brain, up over the gyri, down into the sulci, using spare fissures for latrines.

Facing Faith in the morning had been tough. In the glare of daylight the tracks of her plastic surgery—nose job, chin tuck—were all too apparent to his doctor's eye. They'd sat across the table at a breakfast of strong coffee, aspirin, untouched halved grapefruits, and cigarettes.

Faith had wanted to chat, Orville did not. He'd tried to be polite but felt that if he didn't get her out in twenty minutes he would plunge a serrated grapefruit spoon into her heart, or maybe into his own. Secretly he'd had himself beeped for “an emergency,” and with a promise to see Faith again soon, he'd ushered her out.

He picked up the letter and read on:

 

Love is a many-splendored thing, but then there are the Sols of the world. I never told you this, but as soon as Penny was born I decided I'd had enough of Sol. But I couldn't go through with it. Was I a coward? Well, it was wartime and for all his faults the man had a certain earning power. But I'll never forgive him for dragging me to Columbia.

I bet you're practicing with Bill. I mean, what else would you do, sell toys? Bill's Christian, but nice. Nice man, terrible doctor. I went to him with that pain in my groin and he gave me that Ointment of Starbusol, so I went around even to social functions smelling like a pine tree and it turned out to be a hernia! And all my years of dizziness and tinnitus in one ear that he misdiagnosed as inner ear until I went to Sinai and they found the brain tumor. So that's another reason I brought you home: Good health care for Columbians. But I'm writing for another reason: suicide.

Do you know it runs in the family, on my side? (Sol's side is full of pathetic, meshuggeneh optimists.) You know Aunt Bernice who supposedly “fell” in the kitchen? Nope. Head in the oven. You remember in the Old Country my father's father Abraham, at the height of his success selling hides to the Russian Army for the Japanese War, supposedly died in combat? Wrong again. Slit his own throat. Do you know how blue I used to get, not hearing from you, not even a postcard or a call? Knowing you were angry at me? I got suicidal, too, you bet. Old people think a lot about death. Getting old is not for sissies. Especially disfigured and handicapped, from all those nerves being cut. “Do you have hobbies?” someone asked me the other day. “No, I have doctors.” Sol tried hard, taking me on trips, but he never took me on my dream trip—doing Russia, that boat trip down the Vodka. So, suicide. You never understood me, never. I was brave, and well-informed. You don't really know about life until you're dead, and now I am (well, not now, but now) and now I do. So read every word as if it were carved in stone, like Genesis was, and treat me right—which, for you, would be a
first!

Love Mom

Orville threw the letter aside. He poured himself a Dickel on ice and cracked a Budweiser—neither seemed enough, on its own—and glanced out the kitchen window to make sure she wasn't flying around.

Well, she was and she wasn't. There she was, more hovering than flying. Outfitted for travel—brown worsted jacket and skirt, pumps, navy blue pillbox hat. She looked tired, bedraggled. He stared at her.

“Of course I'm tired, doll, I just flew in from the coast.”

“The Gulf Coast? The condo in Naples?”

“The West Coast, Hollywood. It's not easy, flying all the way cross-country on a broomstick! Haha!” She floated away over the copper dome of the courthouse.

Dead, she's funny? Relieved that Bill was taking a call, he picked up the phone and dialed Celestina in Rome to make final arrangements for her arrival the next day.

It rang for a long time.

“
Ja? Ja? Sprechen?
” A man's voice—groggy, as if just awakened. It was five in the afternoon in Rome.

“Celestina? Celestina Polo? Is Celestina there?”

“Vait.”

Ohhh shit, Orville thought, waiting. And waiting.

A rustling, maybe sheets. “
Pronto?
” Celestina.

“It's me.” His heart was pounding.

“This is not the very good time to talk.”

“Okay.” He tried to stay calm. “I just wanted to make sure everything's okay.”

“Bad news.”

“What?”

“Hold,
per favore.
” A phone moving, a door closing. He felt his heart fall into his gut, as when, with her in Orta, he'd gotten the telegram of his mother's death.

An extension picked up. Celestina said, “I cannot come tomorrow.”

“What do you mean? You've got to come! You have no choice but to come!”

“I'm going to Nepal.”

“Nepal?” He was screaming. “With a
German?
”

“Swiss.”

“You can't. I won't stand for it. I'll come.”

“It is not what you think. The banker owns half an elephant. In a hidden valley filled with yogis and monks. It is the chance of a lifetime, a spiritual journey. Rafting. Venture capital for the all-Euro
sangha!
Not for me, for the
dharma.
It is life,
caro,
life—either you grab it or you miss it.”

“Wait. Hold it.” He breathed. “I'm breathing.”

“Good. I feel your sensual breath through the very phone.”

“What about us?”

“I love you still with all my heart.”

“Well, then come! Come here! Don't go to Nepal!”

“I will be back. I will come to you. I promise.”

“You've been promising for three months!”

“But it seems like only yesterday that we were in Orta, no?”

“No. It seems like a year! I can't believe you're doing this to me. For a German?”

“A Swiss. In the war, they were neutral.”

“In
that
war, they were neutral.”

“I feel your hurt, but I—”

“Hey, it's simple, baby. I love you. Come.”

She was crying, sobbing. “Dearest one, my heart is breaking.”

“Then come. Come now.”

She hesitated. “Tomorrow I leave for Nepal. When I come back, perhaps—”

“No. If you don't come tomorrow, it's over. Either you grab it or you miss it.”

“Then I shall miss it now. But it is merely now.
Carissimo, arrivederci!
Always remember, it is—”

“No, I didn't mean—”

“—a
gift.
” She sobbed.

“But I can't live—”

Click.

Orville stood there dazed, the phone buzzing in his ear. Then, frantic, feeling he had forced her to choose when she was holding open the choice, he frantically redialed. The phone rang and rang. He redialed again. It rang and rang. He hung up.

Suicide? He had barbiturates, a needle, good veins. A strange thought came to his mind: I'd kill myself, but I don't want to make my mother happy.

He began pacing around the dead house. Pacing, pacing.

Everything's falling apart. Gotta get out of this house. Run.

Going out the front door, black bag in hand, he saw a sight that blasted him again. The Family Schooner Raking Leaves. Two blond boys were being chased around the front yard by the athletic blond mom, all three diving into the big pile of leaves and scattering a rainbow up into the autumn air, while the white-haired dad stood by, smiling, in one hand a rake, the other cradling a pipe out of which an enticing, even healthy, wire of smoke arose as if hooking into a higher good, even a common good. Schooner saw Orville and waved gaily, gesturing to his neighbor to come join the Sunday fun.

A molten pulse of envy hit Orville in his solar plexus, sparking the filigree of tiny nerves to fire, knocking the breath out of him. He staggered, trying to hide it from Schooner. He hoisted his black bag as an explanation.

Schooner gave him a thumbs-up and then a clenched fist “Go for it!” The pipe stem pointed to the heavens.

Heart in shreds, feeling transparent and with no idea of who he was now or what he was doing except that he was mortally wounded and alone with the pain, Orville reflexively raised his own fist and smiled.

He closed the coffinlike door of the Chrysler on himself and was filled with self-loathing. He smashed the steering wheel as hard as he could, feeling a welcome pain in his fists and screamed at himself, “Asshole! You asshole! You jerk!”

Driving aimlessly around what now seemed remarkably desolate and ugly countryside, sometimes enraged and screaming and banging the steering wheel and sometimes feeling as sad and lonely as all the men he'd doctored as they'd died with no one else there—in the end, from the whole world, no one else there!—he tried to keep afloat. He found himself way out on 9H, driving fast past Lindenwald, the home of President Martin Van Buren whoever he was, and then whizzing past a small pond bordered with two peculiar tiny old houses—one brick, one white clapboard. For some reason he stopped, turned around, and went back.

In the parking lot was an old, beaten-up Ford station wagon with fake wooden paneling, a Country Squire. On its bumper was the message
WORTH SAVING
. The sign on the brick house read
LUYKAS VAN ALEN HOMESTEAD
1737. On the white clapboard one,
ICHABOD CRANE SCHOOLHOUSE
19
TH C
. An old woman with her gray hair in a badly done bun beckoned him to the homestead.

On his suicidal afternoon off, Orville was not ready for old women in badly done buns. He skulked into the schoolhouse.

A single small room. Rows of kid-sized one-piece wooden desks and chairs, facing, to his left, a blackboard above which hung a nineteenth-century American flag, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and A Dog and A Cat. Across the room were two tall windows, half-open. The room, like all the distemperate schoolrooms of his past that had been either too hot or too cold, was too hot. Through the century-old glass the red-leafed maples and white birches wobbled.

Orville put a fingertip into a groove carved in a desktop, tracing a Cupid's heart and arrow linking one JS & SB. Feeling a rush of sorrow for these long-dead children and whatever was now dying inside himself, he raised his eyes to the windows to get away, to get out, and lifted his hands to his chin, his fingers on his cheeks as if they could keep things in place, aligned, alive.

His hands dropped to his sides, hanging down helplessly. His nose clogged up and his throat ached dryly, presaging real tears, and for the first time since his divorce from his first love—from innocence itself, really—he lost the fight and stood there with tears easing down his cheeks. He felt he had lost his place in the world—no Celestina, no Lily, no real friends, even—nothing to run away to anymore, but nothing to stay for either. No place in the world and a lot of time left.

All at once he sensed he was not alone. He turned. In the corner to his right, a woman sat at a desk.

Their eyes caught and held. Hers, in the low light from those two west-facing windows, glinted a fresh light green. Her hair was bright red, pulled back into a girlish ponytail, and her skin was that redhead's cream, sparsely freckled. Revealed by her sleeveless scoop-necked dress, the muscles of her shoulders and neck seemed prominent for her slenderness. She'd made up her eyes with care, liner and shadow, which seemed strange, to make your eyes up for a lonely volunteer Sunday afternoon where she might encounter only a few blue-haired ladies or some lumbering dodoes looking for some free activity for their kids. Her plump scarlet lips were pursed, and her head was tilted in curiosity. It seemed terribly still in the room, as if time had stopped, leaving something else.