Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Out there with Stu Barkus under the moon, I remembered this and told him about it. He listened. Barkus didn’t tell his own stories. He didn’t tell me, for instance, as I might have done, about a time he betrayed his own father’s small attempt at something approximating love. If he said anything at all, I don’t remember what it was. He may only have nodded his head in the dark.

My father tried, my mother tried. They knew they’d end sooner or later. In the meantime, we had to live. So they took us out to the moors, a mythical place that we all thought existed. Other people’s laughter on the wind. My mother on the grass staring at the sky, my father talking, my brother reading. I was the youngest, wandering in circles.

An old Communist who believed in it once and for all time, but who also, almost from the very beginning, nursed a healthy animosity for the liars who carried it out and fouled it up — so he was never considered by anyone who mattered to be a very good Communist — walks the streets of Nusle in northwest Prague with hunched shoulders. Feet no good anymore, and so he shuffles, wanders, watches the changes, watches the young men and their cars, watches the apartment balconies crumble. What good was believing? And yet the alternative was not having faith in his fellow men, and isn’t this another way of dying? Now he shuffles and watches, not hating any of it, any of them, but at the same time lording over them like the god he always swore he never wanted to be, and yet, if there’s been any change at all in him after thirty-two years of heavy labor at Poldi Kladno, it is this: that he’s so old now he is like a god, not participating, only watching, not giving any opinions, not scoffing, not pointing his glass and spouting off in the pub about the way things were then — none of that. Only existing, whatever this means, if it can mean anything for a man who no longer has the strength to work. And even the love he once had for Marketa has boiled down and hardened, so that it’s not even a memory anymore. More like one of the rocks she used to line up on the windowsill in the kitchen. He can pick it up and hold it, but it doesn’t jolt him. Marketa used to tell him not to be so serious, that he was always so serious, watching himself as though from a camera on the wall. You a movie star, Bohumil?

Irv Pincus used to steal lamps from Kaplan’s Furniture and turn around and sell them in the alley at a deep discount. As a salesman inside the store, the man never lifted a pinkie, but in the alley Irv could really move the merchandise. The store’s gone. In ’66 the state of Massachusetts built I-195 smack through downtown. Kaplan’s gone. City Hall gone. Dug a hole right through Main Street. Eminent domain, the sovereign power to take property for necessary public good. What good the new highway ever did for this city other than allow the rest of the world to drive right by and ignore it, Walt never knew. But maybe this was the point. Don’t slow down, people, otherwise you might notice what’s been lost. When they tore his store down, Walt stood on the sidewalk and wept into his sleeve. Not the store itself he mourned but the hours he spent at his office window watching, among other things, Irv Pincus fleece him in broad daylight. Try explaining this to my wife. It’s the pictures in my head, Sarah, it’s the pictures in my head they’re wrecking. How am I supposed to hold it all without the brick and mortar around to remind me? Walt Kaplan died a decade later at fifty-nine years old. But can’t you see Irv Pincus out there behind the store, auctioning off $150 Hudson Bay lamps to the highest bidder? Shirtsleeves, his flabby arms swinging: Do I hear a hundred? Ninety? Eighty-five? Fifty? Anybody? Forty and it’s a deal. The man outlived Walt Kaplan by more years than anybody in the family bothered to count. Irv relocated to Miami Beach and called it America, sand between his toes, bless his pilfering soul.

FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS, 1957

Can Cataline be cleared? The reputation of the Roman conspirator assigned to infamy in the polemics of Cicero has been reclaimed…

— FALL RIVER HERALD NEWS, SEPTEMBER 25, 1968

Walt’s brother Arthur was a quiet boy who grew into an accomplished man. When they were boys, it was always Shhhhhh, Arthur’s studying . There’s got to be at least one yeshiva bocher in every family and a yeshiva bocher’s got to have quiet. Go play outside, Walt, your brother’s studying. And so Walt went to work in their father’s furniture store and Arthur went to college, first to Brown and then to Columbia for his Ph.D. in classics. Arthur’s face was pale. He always looked as though he’d been dusted with flour. This added to his gravitas, and Walt, like the rest of the family, was proud that Arthur looked the part of a scholar ghost.

Arthur’s first and only book appeared in 1968. For a man who lived such a quiet life (he’d married a wan, squirrelly-looking girl and they lived in Brooklyn without children), the book turned out to be a bit scandalous. The title was innocuous enough: Cataline and His Role in the Roman Revolution . Yet the book was a surprisingly spirited, and graphic, defense of Cataline, a man who apparently made a lot of trouble two thousand years ago. Here he was now, wreaking havoc once again via the pen of meek little Arthur Kaplan, a man who came out of the womb speaking Latin. They called him a villainous fiend, murderer, corrupter of youth and donkeys, venial proprietor, traitor, drunken debauchee, temple robber… Plutarch himself topped it off with the accusation that Cataline deflowered his own daughter .

And all this in the prologue.

What? the family gasped. What? Don’t get us wrong. An author is an author is an author, and our Arthur is an author. His name’s right there on the cover. But incest? Donkeys? Maybe he should have been out in the street playing stickball with Walt.

“Maybe nobody will read it.”

“Ah yes. Of course, that’s the ticket. Nobody will read it!”

“But we’ll put it on the shelf.”

“Yes, absolutely. We’ll put it on the shelf.”

Upon Arthur’s triumphant return to Fall River, he gave a short speech at his alma mater, BMC Durfee High School, noting that the destruction of Cataline’s reputation was the result of the same sort of mudslinging that characterizes the politics of today. “And if you think the Romans were violent? Maybe we ought to look at ourselves in this year, 1968. It is often not the great man who is ultimately heard but his detractors. Detractors always shout louder and use more colorful language. Elections bring out the poet in politicians, don’t they? Take, for instance, the consular elections of sixty-four B.C., when Cicero called Piso (father of Caesar’s last wife, Calpurnia), among other things, brute, plague, butcher, linkboy of Cataline, lump of carrion, drunken fool, inhuman lunatic, feces, epicurean pig, assassin, temple robber, plunderer of Macedonia, infuriated pirate egged on by desire for booty and rapine… And yet it must be said that compared to Piso, Cataline was a red pepper.”

This was followed by an expectant pause. Arthur leaned over the podium, gaped at his audience, and waited.

Someone whispered loudly — it may have been Aunt Haddy — Does he have to keep making those awful lists?

Arthur said it again: “Compared to Piso, Cataline was a red pepper!”

Arthur’s pasty face, his eyes imploring. Sarah nudged Walt: What’s he talking about?

Shhhhhhhhhh.

Walt dug his mouth in his wife’s ear. Claude Pepper, the pinko senator. He’s making a joke . And so it was Walt who finally, out of mercy, rescued his brother by laughing. Everybody else followed his lead. Ah, Red Pepper! Cataline was a Red Pepper! Ha, ha.