Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Valerie Bertinelli played her in the TV movie.

We listened to it on the radio, Larry Phoebus and me. The radio said another shot fired. The radio said SWAT teams. The radio said house surrounded.

We were still in the truck, in the parking lot, waiting out the hours before the Vac-Haul could go home to the garage, when the radio announced another shot, a lone one. The empty parking lot, the train tracks, the tall weeds growing up through the ties. I thought something should change, that at least the light should change. But it was July in Illinois and the sun refused to sink. Only the radio voices were moving. I gripped my doughnuts. The heat in the cab rose with every breath Larry Phoebus took. The side of his motionless face. The radio said stormed the house. Was he hearing any of this? His sharp jutting chin pebbled with gray hair. A strong, ready chin. Even hiding in the parking lot, Larry Phoebus never slouched. In the event of a catastrophic sewage emergency, Larry Phoebus would be there, on the scene. Flash-flood warnings called to him in dreams. The radio said hostage in critical condition. The radio said suspect shot herself in the mouth. The guy from the White Hen came out with a huge bag of garbage and launched it, shot put — style, to the top of the already heaping dumpster like another body.

After the war they met in San Francisco. Bernice waited for him at a hotel on Nob Hill for five days before she got word that his ship had arrived. It is those five days she thinks of, not the reunion itself, which even then she knew was less the beginning of a new life than the start of a long end to the only one she’d ever have. She thinks of the park across the street from a cathedral and the hours she spent sitting with her hands in her lap. It was April and cool and she sat there coatless, not waiting, her mind drained, enjoying it, the days away from the children who’d remained in Chicago with her mother. Men, older men, spoke to her and she didn’t discourage them. They talked about the weather. It was nice to talk about something and not care a lick about it. She can’t remember another time in her life, even during blizzards, when she ever had much to say about the weather, and yet there she was on a bench, in the chill wind, goose bumps on her bare arms, cheerfully saying things like “Who would have imagined it would be so cold in California, and here I am with no coat. My girlfriend Gloria warned me, but I didn’t believe her!” Words flung out her mouth like tiny birds in every direction, that’s how good it felt just to say whatever nonsense came into her head. Because the words themselves meant nothing. It was only the thrill of talking to strangers, men, old men in tweed and scarves, in an unfamiliar place.

“My husband’s in the Navy. He’s coming back from Tokyo, Tokyo, can you imagine? He wrote that if you took the street signs away it looks just like State Street. He says the department stores are even bigger than ours. We’re from Chicago! My husband sells insurance!”

And one or another of the tweedy men would nod respectfully, but even then they could sense, she knew, that she was only talking to fill the air, the space that separated her bench from theirs.

“Ah, yes. Your husband is a true hero.”

“And at home he’s just a scared old tubby!”

And then, unlike talking about him, unlike being genuinely proud of him and half-pretending not to be, suddenly there he was, Seymour, the flesh and the body of him, sharing her bed at the Fairmont. His chatter from the bathroom.

“This head’s bigger than my entire quarters. Can you beat that?” His voice echoing, booming off all that shiny porcelain. “What a life, what a life.” And what surprised her most was how unvoracious he was. She’d prepared herself for him to be voracious, to leap on her with his usual frenzy, burrowing his head into her neck like an excited gopher, and jabbing, jabbing. She’d been ready to do her part for the war effort. Out of appreciation and gratitude and patriotism. All those hours on that terrible ship. Now what Seymour wanted was love, and she couldn’t possibly give that to him. After two years away he was lean, tan, and wanting to be held — held? — and that first morning after that first endless night of his tenderly cooing (My darling, my precious darling) , she’d kept inching away from him across the sheets, his fingers gently kneading her upper arm, until, sometime after dawn, she dropped off the bed. Thunked right down to that thick white Fairmont carpet. It was embroidered with roses, and she ran her palm over one of them as Seymour, confused, peered at her from up on the mattress.

“Man overboard?” he whispered playfully.

“Come here,” she said.

And he rolled off the bed right on top of her, and his weight, though there was less of him than in the past, had crushed her, and yet this was more like it — and there on the floor things got back to normal for a while, and soon he was sleeping again, his snoring low, that familiar snuffling, and she lay there with him still half on top of her. Again, she ran her hand over the carpet roses. She looked up at the ceiling with the naked cherubs holding up the latticework at the corners and thought, home, soon enough home, the children, his work, his office, a blessed secretary.

All that came after. It was those days alone, the wind in the trees, the church rising, not an old church, a new church, not especially beautiful, but welcoming in its way, though she never went inside, only watched the people come and go, in and out, through the big doors. The polite old men on the other benches, in their scarves, weren’t old. She knows this now, of course. They were at most in their early fifties. But then she was, what, twenty-eight? Something so peaceful in that waiting that wasn’t waiting, and what Bernice finds herself doing today is mourning those five days as she mourns so many things, including Seymour, dead three years this June.

The day before she got word of Seymour’s ship, one of the men had asked her for a drink and she’d accepted with the blithe unhesitation of those days, of that city — a city she hadn’t seen much of aside from the hotel and the park, and yet all the lingering hours had at least earned her a temporary place inside its rhythms. What made things even more exciting was that it really could have been any of the men on the benches in the park. It just happened to be Anthony who came to her out of the joyous blur. You could love someone simply because he stepped forward and spoke.

And she’d said, “Why shouldn’t I have a drink?”

After a couple of glasses of wine and some dancing, he’d escorted her up to her room at the Fairmont.