Peter Orner: Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

“A ten-year-old Maoist!” Horace shouted. “God save us!”

“I’m fifteen,” my brother said.

“Listen, boy, capitalists may be dogs, but we’re the only dogs that hunt, and if you think that psalm-singing son of a bitch —”

At this, Josephine scurried into the den. “Shush.” She reminded him that we were still only kids. “Lovey, remember, the sky has yet to fall on their heads.”

“They should keep looking up,” Horace said.

Yet she calmed him. They could take it all away — every cent, the houses, the honorary degrees, and the lifetime community service medallion from the Fall River Chamber of Commerce. They could put all his heirlooms on the front lawn and he could stand there and watch while the auctioneer yodeled and the neighbors hauled off the family silver for a song, but he was still married to Josephine Sharkansky and you could see that in his watery eyes when she came to rescue my brother. Josephine, with her long blue-gray hair pulled tightly around her head, poured another round of tea into our delicate cups. My grandmother, who had been hovering in the kitchen throughout the visit, clattering pots and reorganizing drawers, emerged and said under her breath, “Jo, how can you serve children tea in the good china?”

Josephine looked at my grandmother. She’d only ever been beautiful to Horace. There was something too perfectly oval, maybe, about her face. She was called by men and by women handsome. She said to her sister, “Do you remember tea in the gazebo on Highland Avenue?”

Horace and Josephine often apologized to my brother and me for not being rich anymore. Josephine would say things like: “Oh, lambs, if things hadn’t gone to the absolute dogs, we’d all be on the Cape right now and you two would be splashing in the bay like a couple of little John-Johns.” As a consolation, they would take us to Horseneck Beach on Buzzards Bay. I remember one time we were pulling into the parking lot on one of those blazy gusty days, the waves a fluster of rising white gush, and Josephine turned to Horace and said, “Oh, Mr. Onassis. You’re always taking me places. Today, the South of France.”

Years later, when I was a freshman in high school and my brother was already away at college, I remember standing in the little kitchen on Wampanoag Street, talking to Josephine. She wanted to know what sort of education I was receiving at public school. She thought it scandalous that I hadn’t yet read The Charterhouse of Parma . How could a boy your age not be exposed to the passionate antics of Fabrizio? Horace had been skulking around, ignoring us. Talk of anything other than politics or business irritated him; he was lonely for my brother. I watched him stoop to pick something up off the kitchen floor. He tickled Josephine’s ankle with a couple of stubby, unsteady fingers. She reached down and, without taking her eyes off me, swatted. Horace muttered and withdrew like a shooed-away crab.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought it was a crawly.”

But they couldn’t carry on like that forever, and Horace, who was seven years older, eventually got sick. No one in our family ever says what anyone is sick with, sick is sick. Whatever it was, it soon became too serious for Josephine. Aunt Molly had died by this time. So they moved Horace to the Jewish Home for the Aged out on Warren Avenue. And though he never did get much better, Horace didn’t die right away, either. He lingered for years. Whenever I visited Fall River, my grandmother would conspire to keep me busy seeing other relatives, but I overheard things because she was a terrible whisperer. Once, she hid in the bathroom. The phone cord was stretched across the hall and ran under the door. Still, she practically shouted. “I don’t know, Haddy. Last Tuesday he stopped eating.” Then Josephine fell down on the icy sidewalk in front of Molly’s. They ran tests. Again, nobody talked, but we knew it was bad and that it went beyond a broken hip. My grandmother couldn’t get Josephine a bed in the Jewish Home, even though Horace’s money had put a new wing on the place back in his salad days. Ginsburg was chiseled above the front door. My grandmother stomped around the house. “Waiting list? Our Josephine on a waiting list?” She sat at the kitchen table with the phone book. “I’m going to make some calls.” I watched her finger in the rotary, poised to circle. She rammed the phone down.

“Damnit, if he didn’t steal from the father, he stole from the son.”

“What about Uncle Ira?” I said.

My grandmother stood up. Even in her sweat suit, she was square-shouldered, bulky, formidable. My grandfather had so many names for her: La Duce, Generalissima Patton. My grandfather’d been dead at least ten years by then.

“Ira Pinkus?” my grandmother said. “May we never sink so low.”

She sat down again and stared at the phone book. Horace needed special medical care and couldn’t be moved from the Jewish Home. Josephine clearly couldn’t live alone. My grandmother was stretched too thin driving around caring for Uncle Charlie and Aunt Haddy, both of whom could hardly walk, not to mention Ida in Providence with her kidney trouble and Pauline with her nerves and dizzy spells. And everybody, old and young, was too broke and too busy. There was no choice but to put Josephine in the state home across the river in Somerset. “It’s close enough,” my grandmother said. “Just across the Braga Bridge.”

My brother told me this last part as we stood blowing into our hands at Josephine’s graveside service in the late 1990s. He said not to repeat it. He got it from my mother, who told him not to tell anybody. She’d heard it from my grandmother who’d told her, before she herself died, not to breathe a word to a soul. Stories move across my family in this efficient way. My brother said that a week before Horace’s death, a year and a half before Josephine’s, two of my cousins, Monroe, Horace and Josephine’s only child, and Hannah, Ida’s daughter, arranged for Horace and Josephine to say good-bye. At this point, Horace was blind and mostly slept all day, but Monroe smuggled him into a car — this was all against strict doctor’s orders, so it had to be done undercover — and drove him to a shopping center between the two nursing homes. Hannah delivered Aunt Josephine, who by then had lost nearly half her body weight. Horace and Josephine hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years. The family had been waiting for one or the other to die quietly, but neither would cooperate. He was ninety-five. She was eighty-eight. The two cars pulled up, and there they were, Horace and Josephine, in the parking lot of Al Mac’s. Josephine was able to stand up and walk slowly over to Horace, who was slumped in the passenger seat. Monroe opened the door and started to help him, but Horace pushed him away. He knew she was close and tried to pull himself out of the seat, but couldn’t; so Josephine leaned into the car, and Horace dropped his head on her shoulder. Then she whispered something to him. Neither of my cousins heard what she said. Maybe she told him she’d meet him wherever he was going and not to worry, they’d be flush when they got there. Meet me by the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo, at Beaumont’s. I’ll be the one in the fox coat and white heels . The two of them remained slumped over each other until my cousins finally broke them apart and drove them away in separate cars.

Iwas six, maybe seven months old, and I had a babysitter named Eva. She was from somewhere in the West Indies and spoke with, my parents always said, the most charming singsong accent you could imagine. My father called her the governess. That night my parents were at the opera. It was February. This is when we lived on Lincoln and Webster, near Oz Park. The heat went out in our building and it got so cold that Eva wrapped me in a towel and put me in the oven. My parents came home from Rigoletto and found Eva jumping in place in the kitchen. On her head was a large furry Russianish hat of my father’s. My mother, essentially unalarmable in any circumstances, didn’t scream when she realized what was in the oven, though at first she wasn’t entirely sure what she was seeing. My father, too, he just took it in. He may have been equally astonished that the governess was wearing his favorite hat. Me? Nobody asked, but had I been able to talk I would have said I was comfortable as hell and that my removal from this new womb was as unwelcome as my previous abduction from the original. Eva had the right idea. The minute I get settled you people come and yank me out—