Postcards from Pinsk Page 3

  “Well, you know, a great deal does depend on your mother.”

  “I really don’t think so, Dad. To be frank, that is.”

  “Oh don’t worry, I know how she feels at the moment. But why don’t we save it for the Symposium. I’ll plan on seven, and maybe I’ll bring a little something for the boys.”

  “Look at it this way, Dad,” said Clyde, and launched a paragraph more convoluted than concise about Orrin’s future prospects as compared to those of “tomorrow’s high school hero, only just being born tonight and yet likely to die a scant nineteen years from now in some slimy distant jungle.”

  “Is this what you mean?” said Orrin to his sometimes verbose son, and handed over this hasty scribble:

  “That’s right,” said Clyde. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “You couldn’t have put it any worse, dear,” grinned Phyllis. “But we simply mean the obvious, Orrin. That you are not old—you don’t look old or seem old—and we hope to keep up your youth and strength with a good square meal.”

  “Well thank you, Phyll, I appreciate it.”

  “Grandpa is so old,” said Jethro. “If he isn’t old, then who is?”

  Orrin didn’t mind any of it. Clyde and His Bride were not out to prove anything, they were simply talented in these areas—food and drink, furniture and music—and their home was a comfortable place. Clyde’s Gregorian Bluefish, a last-minute replacement for the roast beast, made the best meal Orrin had eaten in months and the half-hour he passed with Jethro and then Corey in their respective lairs was easily the highlight of his fall social season. When Corey wanted to go through the stamp album page by page, Clyde assumed a rescue was in order, but Orrin would not have missed a single Andalusian, Bora Boran, or Manitoban commemorative. He loved the boy’s eagerness, so small and so close to him on the bed, and he even loved the stamps, for here apparently was the last residue of fine print design in an allegedly visual age.

  And when he was finally pressed for some semblance of a plan, a new approach to life, he made it into a game with the boys. On a blank sheet, each was invited to propose a new job for his grandfather, a trip to anywhere in the world, and a second wife—this last to be illustrated.

  “Read mine first,” said Corey, and Phyllis did:

  “He’s got you managing the Red Sox, spending the winter in Hawaii, and marrying Alyssa Milano. Alyssa Milano?”

  “I don’t know her either, but the first two suggestions are so good, she must be too. Let’s hear Jethro.”

  “I’ve got his. Nothing wrong with your old job, no place like home, and never marry again seems to be the message here! Looks as though we have a conservative in the house.”

  “Well I’m a conservative too,” said Orrin, hugging both of his grandchildren. “But let me see the illustration of this Milano woman.”

  Orrin enjoyed every minute and yet was strangely relieved when the festivities concluded around ten o’clock. Odd though it might seem, he felt no need of a social life, whether out on the town or at The Club, which he had not visited in weeks. His need was to be at home, this new home on Filbert Street, and to know that he could contact what he increasingly thought of as “the outside world” via the telephone. Of course one could not expect to conduct a proper life on the telephone (especially if no one ever answered the sucker) but Orrin knew he was in for something other than a proper life just now.

  Phyllis drove him back to town and insisted on coming upstairs for a look at the apartment.

  “So do I pass the test?”

  “It’s quite nice, isn’t it. Cozy. But I hope you won’t mind my being a little blunt with you, Orrin?”

  “Oh no, Phyll, be any way you want.”

  “All I mean is that you must know Clyde can’t. Be blunt, or quite truthful. He’s uncomfortable about hurting you, naturally …”

  “You do it, Phyll. You hurt me—go on.”

  “Someone needs to say to you that two months have gone by and you are just here waiting for Gail to change her mind, I think. And she isn’t going to. You heed to hear that from someone, Orrin, and I guess I’m the nominee.”

  “The villainess! Look, I understand, dear girl, and I appreciate your concern. I even appreciate a kick in the seat.”

  “Do you understand? I wonder if you could analyze yourself half as well, see yourself half as clearly, as you can see your clients.”

  “Even half as well might help, eh?”

  “I think so. I think it’s time for a toughminded self-analysis, if there is such a thing.”

  “I could bill myself out at half-price and still do all right on the deal.”

  “A word to the wise-ass,” she said, and left it at that. Orrin gave her a hug and saw her back downstairs and into her car, noting the pleasant October air.

  But perhaps she was right. Perhaps he ought to sit down with himself and a drink (two drinks, though, one for each of him) and interview himself in prospectus. That was the trend, of course, a client interviewing the therapist for suitability. Next thing you’d be compiling snap-shots of those whose burdens had been alleviated, like the old bite-plates an orthodontist dragged out to prove he could straighten teeth! No job too large or small, no charge for estimates—it could yet become as demeaning as selling a vinyl-siding job.

  But it took no intake, no special screening, for Orrin to know that his strengths were the charm and intelligence God had given him plus the good teeth and eyes and a fine field of hair that God had yet to take away. He also knew his weaknesses: nostalgia, mild forms of bitterness, moderate paranoia. The exercise was a joke, and such spuriousness was a clean country away from the wellsprings of pain and neurosis.

  Orrin at fifty-eight did not expect to hear a skeleton rattling in his broom-closet or the slither of ghosts unrequited in his attic eaves. To him the problem was terribly prosaic and altogether current—Gail had stuffed him—and it called for plainspoken pragmatic advice. He had lost the habit of bearing down anyway. With all these clinical psychos inching in on the practice of analysis (not to mention the vast clientele being siphoned off into New Age booshwah rackets that could all but promise heavy petting in their street leaflets), Orrin had gone to a fairly watery mix himself.

  How many times had he urged some poor soul to take up a hobby, the old Balsa Wood Therapy? Or recommended getting outside one’s personal pain by seeing to the greater pain of others: take up a Cause. Or fed them the line about dining out with a friend of the opposite sex—“Nothing sexual, but you get back a sexual identity, you know.” One had to marvel at such expertise as that.

  He replaced the puddle of whiskey in his glass with another one every bit as piddling; the first had apparently evaporated, the second he whacked down, since it was time for his constitutional. Now there was therapy, just to get the feet going on a nice October night.

  A winter sky, with soft gauze wrapped loosely round a three-quarter moon and fragments of light shattered like, tempered glass below it. Down along Charles, every gaslight mimicked the aurora moon, shroud and fraglight, and late strollers hurried through the wind. Crossing the Gardens, Orrin saw romance in the over-arching beeches: lit from within the tentative embrace of huge limbs, the trees took on a theatrical lustre, as though Shakespearean assignations might soon ensue there, Orlando and Rosalind in the forest of Arden …

  By day a profuse foot-traffic, cross-section of society, crisscrossed the Boston Common. Late at night motion slowed and commotion halted, and the turf fell into the hands of a vague underclass, Dickensian riffraff, the denizens of an “edge” which Elspeth might not find so alluring. If it was your pattern to travel home from the bank to Belmont on an afternoon train, or even to climb the stairs on Acorn Street at dusk (as Orrin had done for so many years) you could easily fail to realize that this society existed, or believe its members were apparitions from the Depression past, or from far lands where democratic ideals had never taken root—the damp back alleys of Bombay or the teeming ditches of Mexico Cit
y.

  But Orrin knew they were there. On the ledge of the fountain of course, in the shadows round every tree-trunk, two or three to every bench, plus the rather substantial group by the intermittent fire in the drained pool basin, a spot so safe that the constabs simply allowed it.

  “Establish a scholarship, sir, in your name? Send this young man on to the University of Life?”

  Orrin must have stood too long by the cluttered bench near Tremont Street. He saw there was nothing young about the would-be student, a stocky round-eyed man, but there was something likable, and something arresting in the voice. Of course it was just a hook culled from the textbook on cadging and turned to a fine phraseology, Anonymous. Still, even without an overtly messianic rush, Orrin did suppose he might help here.

  “Do I take it you want to drink?”

  “Wellsir, I am thirsty. What would you do if you were thirsty, sir?”

  “As it happens I am thirsty, and I would be happy to buy you a drink or two.”

  “Step right this way, then. We’ve got this round covered and probably the next, so we can drop your contribution right into the vault.”

  He indicated a large wool purse, a satchel almost, with bamboo flanges, stowed below their bench. Introducing himself as P. Jones and his companion, mistress of the pursestrings, as Marie LeBlanc, he urged Orrin to call them Pigford and Sad Mary if he liked.

  “Welcome to the Dog-and-Cat,” said Mary.

  “Cheapest tavern in the town,” said Pigford. (Clearly it was something of a routine they did.)

  “The Dog-and-Cat?” Orrin almost expected to see a hand-carved brightly-painted wooden sign swinging from the oak branch overhead.

  “Well you can see it isn’t exactly The Bull and Finch.”

  “Or The Lion and the Unicorn.”

  “And it does rain dogs and cats in this particular inn, at this particular time of the year.”

  “Now tell him the truth, you old liar,” said Mary.

  “All right. Mary had a cat when I first met her—”

  “Not a little lamb?” said Orrin.

  “No, a cat. And I had a dog. So there you are. When we teamed, we would always do our tippling at the Dog-and-Cat, or so we said. Simple as that.”

  Thus the rest of the routine. The pair took their liquor in paper shot-glasses, the three-ounce toothbrushing size, from the Stop & Shop. Mary shook a third cup loose from the satchel and P. Jones poured. Then, because the night was young and so were they, they drank the first of many healths.

  4

  Orrin was trying to recollect the circumstances which had led to his sheltering the man P. Jones. For Pigford, who had in that first burst of accessibility invited Orrin to call him as his friends did, was still deep in the sofa snoring and Orrin could not quite pretend to be thrilled by the sight of him.

  He recalled leaving The Dog-and-Cat at “closing time” and making a pit stop at a packie on Tremont. From there they had proceeded down a narrow alleyway between brick tenements to the trashcan hearth where Pigford and Sad Mary had carved out a comicbook hobo existence, almost snug under a sheet-metal canopy bridging two sealed-off delivery doors. When Orrin, in an access of charity (and basically shitfaced) had offered them both a night’s respite from the cold, Mary had perhaps misunderstood him and taken offense, standing on her honor and virginity.

  “At sixty-five? Come on, Mary, fess up,” he had smiled, but Mary stood firm: “Truth is truth, governor, and I turn forty-three this month and that’s the truth, too.”

  She had in any case declined the indoors absolutely. Jones, however, agreed it might be an “experience worth having” and what with the mention of another nightcapper assented to extend their companionship a few hours further. Now Orrin remembered their journey over the lawns of the Common, ebullient and philosophical by turns. His friend had craved the chance to display his mastery of “current events” and begged Orrin to quiz him; and because Orrin could not manage the feat, Jones was left to volunteer his insights into world affairs scattershot.

  By moonlight, Jones had seemed a gentleman, bright and clearspoken, a man of some ideas and of high moral standard. Sleeping in the sunlight now, he looked decidedly soiled at the cuff and Orrin could not overlook the analogue: it was as though he had brought home some aged street-witch in a blind and searing lust, only to see her laid bare in the cruel sobriety of morning light; and himself laid bare, besides.

  More than willing to nurture Jones through the night, willing even now to ensure him a large and wholesome breakfast, Orrin knew that basically he needed to unload his new friend. Jones must go. And because he had Alice Harris coming to the office in her new morning slot, Jones must go with some expedition. So Orrin pushed at his guest, and pulled, and tweaked the face-hair until finally the dear fellow did stir in a brief hail of spittle and sat up like a shot with both hands over his head in an attitude of surrender. Then subsided in shivers, registered his surround, and politely requested the “dog’s hair in a glass.”

  “I would accommodate you at once, my friend, if supplies had outlasted you in the night. As it is, my best offer is breakfast at The Paramount. Black coffee and the lot.”

  “A plate of eggs? Sounds fine, Orry, just the thing. And if Big Ben over there is even close to the mark, we can replenish our supplies in short order.”

  “As to that, I hope you’ll allow me to stand you a round or two in absentia,” said Orrin, who found himself sliding into the hyperflated erudition associated with stage drunks, or perhaps hearkening back to his W. C. Fields stint of the previous week. “The thing is, I have a ten o’clock appointment for which I cannot afford to be one second late.”

  “You really a headshrinker, like you said?”

  “Truth is truth, as Sad Mary says.”

  “But then isn’t the truth that you can afford any goddamn thing in the world? It would be.”

  “Put it this way, P. If by chance I am one second late for my ten o’clock appointment—and if my tardiness has a certain effect on a certain client—it could end up costing me fourteen trillion dollars, according to my attorney. And I have only thirteen.”

  “Thirteen trillion!”

  “I know it sounds like a lot. But to fall even one trillion in arrears—look at it that way. Imagine yourself coming back to that mark.”

  “You are a funny one, Orry. I enjoy your company. And I thank you for all your hospitality. Did I tell you anything about myself last night?”

  “Quite a lot. But the only thread I could see winding through your checkered career, was thirst.”

  “That’s putting a fine finger on it! You cancel out my thirst, Orry, and I swear to you I would be in the U.S. Government Post Office still today. And eligible for a lovely pension too, at an early date. There’s the bitch of it.”

  “You kind of blew it, P.”

  “That’s hitting the nail smack on the head! I swear you would make one hell of a headshrinker. What’s the hour charge over there, anyway?”

  “Well there’s a sliding scale.”

  “Once again? I’m not much on the musical side.”

  “The hourly charge is on a sliding scale—from low to high, according to one’s ability to pay.”

  “Now I get you. So then what’s the low side of it?”

  “One hundred dollars per session.”

  “Service com-pree!” Pigford burst out, with surprisingly international enthusiasm. “Talk about your bargains! I won’t dare ask after the high side. But who are these poor buggers can only afford the hundred dollar rate? Car parkers?”

  “You may be a man of the street, Pigford, but you are also a man of parts. I’m frankly embarrassed to be discussing such numbers with you.”

  “Don’t be, I don’t care. I made my bed. And anyone can pay the hundred for a well-disposed ear, by all means let him pay it. It’s not like you’re charging at that rate for his hamburgers or whiskey.”

  “The essentials, you mean.”

  “I do. You never want t
o overcharge the essentials, but why not make em dig deep for luxury. Isn’t that best?”

  “Damn if you don’t make me feel better already. But I’m afraid we better step on it, if we want to catch a good breakfast. There might be time for a shave, if you like.”

  “Oh no. Mary likes some growth on me.”

  “The Virgin Mary? What would it matter, if she tells the gospel truth?” Orrin tossed in a wink, to disarm against any possible offense here.

  “She is no snuggle of mine, nor anyone else’s, and that is gospel. But she is partners with me and she does have to look at me, as I do her. It’s an appearance thing, Orry. Just the same way she won’t wax her mouth because I hate the look of it.”

  “Because it reminds you of your wife? Or your mother? What?”

  “Cause it reminds me of an Indian chief, such as slew my great Aunt Maisie. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

  Asleep he had been almost disgusting, but conversing Pigford was once more affable. Like many drinkers, he could not help making unsolicited excuses for himself, or making the business of drink his recurring topic. No doubt, therefore, his society would pale in time. Also he continued to shiver very gently, even in the steamy warmth of The Paramount, with a stack of hotcakes and two mugs of coffee inside him. Only the dog’s hair could quiet this, Orrin supposed, and with a complicity mitigated by inevitability he did stake Pigford to a fresh supply.

  “So what will you do today? What is a typical day for you?”

  “Typical day in the life of P. Jones? Well, for starters I’ll tell you any day is a piece of cake. It’s the nights.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Orrin, frankly alarmed by this irrefutable brotherhood of issues. “But still, what will you do? How will you pass the time?”

  “Milk and honey, nothing but. We’ll eat at the McDonald’s, three or four meals usually—”

  “Can you afford that, then?”

  “We can afford anything that’s free. Didn’t you know they pitch out perfect burgers all day long? Lest they be unfresh, you see.”