Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (30 page)

“
Me?
”

“You were the only guy I knew I could respect. And I decided that whatever you said I should do, I'd do.”

“That never happened, Henry.”

“Of
course
it never happened, Orvy. You were away at college. I got your mother.”

“Oh, God.”

“I always liked her and respected her. So when she said you weren't there, well, I asked her.”

“You asked
Selma
what you should do?”

“I remember, in the background, the ferry was goin' ‘
toot toot,
I'm leaving for Canada now,
toot, toot!
' It was one of those moments, ya know what I mean?”

“And she said?”

“‘Don't run away. Don't you
dare!
Stay. Do your duty to God and country. Like Sol did.' Great lady, your mom. She made me promise I would stay. And it changed my life. Your mother changed my life. Because I did the right thing. If I'd have gone to Canada, my life would've turned out crap. Going to 'Nam, doing the right thing, made me what I am today. The navy made me a man. Never looked back. Me, in the White House basement with Ollie North of the National Security Agency. Can you
believe
it?”

“Hard to,” Orville said again. Henry didn't notice the dig.

“I owe it all to your mom.”

The mosquitoes were at them. They both slapped for a few seconds.

“There's one thing I've been wondering, though,” Henry went on, a slight hitch in his voice. “If I
had
gotten you on the phone, what would you have told me to do?”

“I'd've told you to run.”

Henry busted out laughing, really laughing, starting with his square face, his eyes going slitty and his nose red and then his eyes tearing up and he holding his gut and then holding onto the porch railing. Despite himself, Orville joined in. “Well then . . . Orvy . . . it's . . .” He tried to catch his breath. “It's a good thing I got her! Ha! Haha!” He was off again on a spiral of guffaws.

Orville waited.

“So then . . . when I . . . when I came back, I got to be friendly with her. She was like the mother I never had. She wasn't in the best of health, so I kinda would look in on her. We'd talk about you. Rocky relationship, you and her.” Henry held out his hands like an umpire telling two ballplayers to calm down. “Hey, understood. She seemed more depressed this time of year last year—actually toward the end of July, around your birthday. Didn't look healthy. I stopped in more. And she died. Alone. On the kitchen floor. Died alone on the kitchen floor.” Henry seemed to wipe away a tear or two. He reached out, squeezed Orville's arm. “I figure she'd have wanted me to look after you.”

Orville watched the refrigerator body walk slowly back across the park through the summer evening. At the midway point, in a cone of light where the path from the courthouse steps crossed the path linking the two houses, Henry turned and waved gamely. Then he turned away and walked on, off.

Don't believe a word of it.

And yet back in the spiritless house, Orville was startled to find that with Henry gone, he felt even more alone.

PhwweeeeeEEETT!

The lovebird saw him walking down the hallway toward its cage in the kitchen and let out a piercing shriek. It had been a Valentine's Day gift from Miranda and Cray. “You need a pet,” she'd said, “and this one's low maintenance.” “Can I name him Starlight?” Cray asked.

Starlight he was. Selma and Sol had hated animals. Penny and Orville had grown up begging for pets. In vain. Living out at Miranda's house, with her finches and cats and friendly raccoons, mice, squirrels, and deer, Orville had realized how suspicious he'd become of pets, how he'd grown up old. When they'd surprised him with the bird, it seemed to him the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Native to Africa, it was a peach-faced lovebird, its head peach and green and yellow and its wing and tail feathers the pastel shadings of blue-green that you see on a tropical coast. Taking a bath in a dish, its tail feathers moved faster than the eye could see. He was amazed by the seamlessness of the feather shadings, peach to gold to green to blue—the words pale and rigid by comparison.

And the miracle of flight! This little thing could fly! Well, sort of fly. With clipped wings, it flew only down. With fierce optimism it would leap, flutter frantically to gain altitude as it fell down to the floor, and then crawl, aided by its hooked beak, up the nearest pants leg to the highest point on the tallest person in the room, usually Orville. It seemed not to notice that it couldn't fly. When happily perched on his shoulder, it would chuff up—“Chuffbird!” Cray would call it—and then flick down its eyelid like a box snapped shut over a glittering dark jewel, and sleep.

As Orville stared at the bird in its cage now, it cocked its head and stared back at him in silence, and he remembered in excruciating detail how Cray, with his high-pitched child's voice, could imitate the high shriek exactly, Starlight answering in kind, in a kind of conversation. The bird would answer not only Cray, but the crash of plates, the ring of the phone, and the doorbell, but never Orville or Miranda. Once at breakfast it had fluttered down onto Cray's plastic placemat, a map of America. “It's walking across America!” Cray said, squealing with delight. “And pooping on Iowa!” Orville added. And on Orville. The bird could watch
TV
on Cray's shoulder for an hour without letting loose, and then the first instant he landed on Orville—jackpot. For better or worse the bird had arrived in his life at a level of love, and at first it could do no wrong.

A pain in the ass, he said to himself now, as he opened the cage door and let the lovebird clamber up onto his shoulder while he cleaned out the pee and poop and sunflower seed shells and feathers from the bottom. If two lovebirds are in a cage, they either tear each other to shreds or bond forever and tear anybody else who goes near them to shreds. And we call them lovebirds?

PhwweeeeeEEEETT!

“Owww! Not right in my ear, okay?”

The bird made only one sound, this shriek, and when it let loose into his ear it rattled the ossicles horrifically, flooding the semicircular canals—an ear-splitting cry.

PhwweeeeeEEEETT!

“Can't you say anything else?”

PhwweeeeeEEEETT!

“Dumb bird,” Orville said, looking it in the eye. As he reached for it, it bit his index finger hard. Reflexively he reached to hit it—but stopped himself in time. He bent his shoulder down to the cage door and in it went. A drop of blood the size of its eye surfaced on his finger. Great. I'll die of psittacosis, die right here in Columbia. Henry can cry for me.

They stared at each other, man and bird. Maybe, he thought, it misses them too? Lately it had been moulting and fretting. Whenever Orville would come into the room, it would race back and forth on the floor of its cage shrieking until he took it out. Every morning for the past week, he discovered that during the night it had knocked down its toy mirror onto the floor of its cage, and in the semidark under the cage cover he could hear it attacking the reflected bird viciously. The bird's irritation irritated him. It was an accusation. The bird was becoming a burden.

Figures, he thought. Lose what you love and your love for everything else fades. The bitter taste in his mouth was almost physical. Doctoring the Columbians, ill and injured and insane in the insect-ridden conflagration of summer, had brought out the bitter taste even more lately. He'd even started swigging Starbusol. Placebo, maybe, but the wintergreen taste helped.

And who do I give the thing to when I go?

The bird was off again on its pointless track meet, running back and forth on the floor of the cage, shrieking. Poor thing. I should apologize. He reached for the cage door and then stopped. His hand lay extended, still as a wax hand, on the air.

A wave of grief hit him.
I've lost them.

This is how it happened now.
He'd be pretty much okay, going along with things as if life were normal, and then—
pow!
—like in the comics a fist would crash in from the frame of the picture and hit him in the gut and he'd stagger and try not to fall. All of a sudden, out of the blue, he would start remembering. He would recall to the slightest detail things said or done that he regretted, or things he didn't do or say but thought to and should have, that any normal person would have automatically—and he felt shocked, shamed, appalled. Haunted by it all. He heard again the last lines of the W. B. Yeats poem his wife Lily had thrown at him—literally—at the end, “. . . and not a day recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled.”

His hand stayed in midair. His mind flew down. I've screwed up everything, he thought, everything, everything! And when I go, where will I go? What's in Europe for me anymore? More nothing.

He got a glass and ice, poured some George Dickel and, taking the bottle with him, climbed the stairs toward the
TV
, his body made of lead.

The Yankees had won and the
TV
had turned back to men blasting away at each other with guns and women acting like cartoons and regular programming being interrupted by a news flash about Our Aged President threatening to drop a lot of nuclear bombs on something or other, itself interrupted by a commercial for a fabulous car. Unable to watch, he found himself heading up to the attic where he took down the Scomparza box with Selma's letters and photos and carried it to his bedroom in the turret.

When he opened it, a part-sweet, part-acrid scent filled the room. The scent of Old Lady—mothballs, musty cloth, baby powder, perfume. He picked up Letter Number 14.

Hi there, Earthling!

Nice to get mail, isn't it? The U.S. Postal Service does
such
a nice job.

I presume you're well. I'm not. (Is dead well?) I've had this damn indigestion again. Can't shake it. Took enough Maalox to plaster a bathroom, and no luck. Bill keeps pushing Starbusol. It was one thing when he put me on that junk as a salve for a muscle pull when in fact I had a hernia, another thing when he gave me a shot of it for my dizziness when in fact I had a brain tumor, but to
drink
the stuff? What disease is he missing now? I'm not afraid of dying—just of dying alone. Not that you would care. This last time you left you didn't even leave your number.

I want to talk to you about love and hate. Of all of us you were the worst at love and best at hate. Penny was medium on each. Sol was bad at love but never got into hate. I myself am the best at love and the worst at hate. I just can't seem to help seeing the best in everyone!

So. You and love. Are you unloveable? When you were born, I was desperate. Twenty-two hours in labor, no dice, so they went in with the forceps. When they yanked you out of me you were long and skinny, your head shaped like a shoebox. The Air Force was awful, and your father greasing up the planes from below was filthy. (The only fun we had was trips from Fayetteville to the ocean, to the big dunes at Kitthyhawk where Wilbur and ***ORVILLE*** made their first flight. Flight—that's you to a “T.”) When I came home from the hospital I felt blue. Sol was itchy to play golf. I said, “All I want from you are the 3 Cs: Care, Companionship, and Concern. Please, Sol, please!” No luck. It was wartime, but I decided then and there to divorce him.

I didn't divorce him and that was the biggest mistake of my life. I should have divorced him the day you were born. Even better, the day before you were conceived—what's one less Rose in the world? I'm sure this old world will keep (keeps) turning now with one less Selma. And to think I had to have my tubes blown to have you. Talk about
pain!

You divorced Lily and you shouldn't have. (Despite the way she treated me.) I should've divorced and didn't; you shouldn't have and did—go figure. What kept me alive, you're asking? Why didn't I follow the family tradition of suicide? One shabbas in 1953 I had a religious experience, and I found my answers: Number 1: so what?, and Number 2: what next? I realized that for the Family Rose to rise, others had to fall. An eye-for-an-eye, dog-eat-dog, two-by-two world.

When you were five you ran from me and never looked back. Never gave me the time of day. Always off on your projects, trying to achieve things. One day we were driving along, you were telling me how great you were, and I lost it and said, “Stop crowing like a cock!” Did this faze you? Not one iota. You did achieve, some. But if Bill hadn't pulled some strings, you'd never have gotten into medical school—and he could only get you in offshore.

Your ongoing sin is being stiff-necked. I noticed at Yom Kippur services you never bowed down with the rest of us—too good for us, eh? Too good for G-d? You and your hifalooting love of Europe and how great Dublin was and how you preferred Paris to Columbia. Think
I
didn't like Paris? Sol didn't? (Okay, Sol didn't, but he came from a long line of short Polish peasants and don't let him or that stupid sister of his tell you anything different!) Every choice you made was a selfish choice and I've had it with you. It's not so much that you have a self-centered view of the world as a world-centered view of yourself.

No wonder I have a heartburn that would gag a vulture.

You ran away from me. You'll run away again in a few weeks, and good riddance. (You think it's bad for Columbia and good for you, but I've got news for you—it's the reverse.) You'll go through the money quicker than you think, and then what, Mr. Bigshot Doctor Without Borders?

It's like another rule I learned in life the hard way: If A Person's Feet Hurt, You Can Always See It In Their Face.

What's that got to do with anything? Lots. It means that by planning to leave again, to run away from your home and family after the year and 13 days are up, you're living proof that you're about as selfish as they come. Which means you'll end up about as lonely as they come. The bottom line?
YOU LET ME DOWN
.