Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

The light slants across the plaza, slightly pinkish now. The four-sided arch looms. It’s really an unfinished building they call an arch. They started to build a new parliament here, but the land was too marshy, and so they had to stop. Didn’t they take off your shoes before they started to build? Maybe politicians who build parliaments never take off their shoes. But aren’t all buildings, like people, unfinished? We build and we build and still we’re not done? I know where to find Rosella and still she’s gone? It’s a question for God, who looms above this arch as indifferent to sisters as he is to parliaments, as he seems to be about so many other things. When they were girls, Rosella once slammed her on the nose with the bottom of a teapot. Teresa forgave her sister the same afternoon. She forgives her again this morning. For the teapot. For not being beautiful anymore. For being so far away she might as well not exist. Rosella. From her eyes not from her mouth in the now noisier morning.

My aunt Josephine would slip fifty-dollar bills into the front shirt pocket of my brother’s Cub Scouts uniform. Go and buy yourself something nice for a damsel, soldier. Then she’d put one of her long, exquisite fingers to her lips to let my brother know that her secret of General Grant should stay between them. And even after Uncle Horace was completely disgraced and they were living in Aunt Molly’s spare room, Aunt Josephine still did that with the fifties. Because she walked around Aunt Molly’s cramped little stucco house on Wampanoag Street the same way she did her marble-floored palace way up at the top of the hill on Highland Avenue. With aplomb and grace. The fact that Horace had gone pauper didn’t change her. Or the paintings that now hung on Aunt Molly’s walls, the paintings Josephine had hid for months in my grandmother’s attic in order to save them from the public auction.

To Josephine, the paintings, one of which she claimed was an early Matisse (a whispy nude), represented who she was, not who she once was. True, they no longer adorned a grand front hall like the one she used to hustle guests through with a flurry of wild waving: Don’t dawdle, come in, come in! Come in! Yet even exiled at Molly’s, Aunt Josephine’s eyes gave nothing away. Not regret, never anger. Uncle Horace had a similar take. His spectacular plunge from the upper stratosphere of Fall River society didn’t stop him from hectoring anyone who came near him about the glories of high finance. That he’d been brought so low was proof that he’d been a true gambler, the sort of visionary American who built this country. You think John D. Rockefeller didn’t take any risks with other people’s money? This whole damn country is built on other people’s money .

By the mid-seventies it was well known throughout southeastern Massachusetts and all of Rhode Island — even the Providence Journal got into the act and put it on the front page — that Horace’s sham investment scheme, his robbing of Peter to pay Paul, as my mother put it years later, had not only bankrupted him, but nearly took the rest of the family — and much of Jewish Fall River — down as well. After decades of Horace paying 8 or 9 percent monthly interest, all his investors lost their principal when the whole thing went bust. They say nobody in the family came out unscathed when it came down to the accounting, except, as my grandmother used to mutter under her breath, Aunt Pauline’s husband, Ira, because Ira Pinkus, the lousy foot dragger, had never earned an honest dollar to begin with and knew a con when he saw one.

Horace and Josephine were our family’s famous once-hads. Horace Ginsburg was the son of an upholsterer who’d taken his father’s tailor shop and built an investment corporation with subsidiaries in five states. We used to make clothes, now all we make is money! So what if it was all a snow job, a paper swindle? A man of business is measured in this world by what it looks like he’s got, forget the actualities. And for years, in addition to the house on Highland Avenue, Horace and Josephine did, it seemed, have a Manhattan condo on East Seventy-Seventh and a beach house on the Cape at Dennis and a pied-à-terre in Nassau. What about his front-row season tickets to Harvard football? Horace didn’t go to Harvard. But what’s it matter, he used to sing, if Harvard’s not my alma matter? I give them wads, wads. Once, Uncle Horace said to my brother, You know what the secret of philanthropy is? Never give a single dime to anybody who needs it . And, of course, he had Josephine Sharkansky, the most ravishing and cosmopolitan girl of Hebrew extraction ever to grace the muddy banks of the Taunton River. They had it all, so it’s no wonder people shoveled their money at Horace. People wanted to talk about the things that Horace and Josephine talked about, modern art, Carl Jung, Nehru; travel to the places they traveled to, Saint-Tropez, Copenhagen, Nairobi. Everyone, even my never stylish, always frumpled grandparents, wanted a piece of that action.

Even after it was all out in the open, Horace and Josephine held tight to their mystique by tossing an enormous costume ball in the waning days before the auction. If we’re going to fail, Josephine must have told Horace, let’s do it grandly, loudly, with abandon, my puckery darling. Horace went as a conquistador; Josephine as Golda Meir, who, she noted, was a librarian before she became a prime minister. We lunched with her in Tel Aviv. Extraordinary woman, marvelous sense of irony…

I came along a lot later. Long after Horace and Josephine’s glory days had been reduced to stacks of overexposed photographs stuffed in envelopes and pushed to the back of lower desk drawers lined with tissue-thin white paper. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, my family’s standard of living had long since plummeted, and the house on the Cape at Dennis was a sun-glared, overexposed memory. There were other disasters: The state built an interstate smack through my grandfather’s furniture store; Uncle Charlie’s cookie business went belly-up because of the price of sugar, something to do with a coup d’état in the Dominican Republic. In the late seventies, my humbled relatives summered in the Fall River swelt.

But as a nine-year-old so shy I only stared at the stains in Aunt Molly’s carpet, even I understood there was something different about visiting this house. When we went to see Horace and Josephine, we were treated like dignitaries from the far-off Midwest. In the summer of 1976, Josephine greeted us in front of Molly’s squeaky screen door and announced: “Nephews, I’ve made pâté.” We settled in the small front room crowded with furniture and sipped tea. I’m sure it was the first time in my life I had ever used a saucer. Aunt Josephine conversed with us. My grandmother’s army of other sisters didn’t so much talk as force-feed. Plates of brownies would materialize, one after the other. They’d been baking nonstop for months. Josephine crossed her legs and asked what we thought of Andy Warhol. Didn’t we think his significance somewhat overstated? After stammering and sipping our tea, we were released to Horace, who was waiting in the spare bedroom with his pipe. We took turns kissing his fuzzled face. He was sitting in the only chair. He motioned us to sit on the bed. A gnarled man, he seemed to shrink every summer. He stood, clapped his hands, and sputtered smoke into my brother’s face.

“A peanut-butter salesman?” he shouted. “Truman hawked hats, but haberdashery is at least a profession.”

“Jimmy Carter is a businessman farmer,” my brother intoned, brushing hair out of his eyes. He’d been practicing for months to talk political shop with Uncle Horace, the only known Republican in the family. “His peanut operation is a major agricultural concern. He also served his country aboard a nuclear submarine. He’s been governor of the thirty-first largest state. He knows what he’s doing, frankly — injecting a little decency into our morally bankrupt society.”