Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

I moved out of the Dubois, with the girls looking up from their drinks at the café to say, “Goodbye, happy trails, cookie boy.” Before I left, I paid Nils back all the bits I’d borrowed. Much to his surprise.

In meetings I talked quite a lot about Liliane. I knew whatever she’d done was her own business, but I had to hope she had a regret or two. I had the idea that I was something Liliane had put in hock, that her awkwardness in the Métro had been like someone passing the pawnshop window with dear ticketed goods right out in front, hideously familiar.

Meetings were full of people who’d pawned their trumpets, their wedding rings. Their false teeth! Their children’s cribs! What did you trade, what was your price? I myself had run out on alimony payments, a crime I hardly thought about. I wrote a letter of apology to Melanie, which she didn’t answer. I wrote to my parents. I paid Josette what I took from the statue. I did those things.

I got promoted to manager at the burger joint, and I was so overqualified that someone hired me to run a pension that catered to international students. I liked that job. The girl students found me interesting, and I had more than a few romances, which nobody fired you for in those days. Then I fell in love with J.J., a fast-talking girl from New York who was studying anthropology, and she convinced me to move back to the States with her.

When I left France, Norman said, “May the next chapter overflow with freedom,” which I later found out was the last line of his infamous memoir. In New York it was a shock to have English all around me, as if I’d been in disguise in France and now was exposed again. My secret ambition was to run a jazz club, and I began with a job taking tickets in a very decent one. I heard great players — my whole life unrolled in that music — but it was a bad place for a nondrinker. I fell off the wagon the first month. J.J., who was too young for this kind of crap, left in outrage that I’d turned out so different, angry that I’d tricked her.

I didn’t feel very tricky. What was I in New York for, without her? Straightening up didn’t bring her back either, no matter how many meetings I went to. But I saw I could stay if I wanted. My next two girlfriends were women I met at meetings. One of them found me a job in a coffee shop in a chain motel near the airport. I wrote to Josette, I wear a white paper chapeau with great style .

In my bad years, I ran a flophouse, a den of sadness, but I took some pride in running it well. I had more patience with the weirdos than anyone was used to. Most of the guys weren’t bad guys, only a few were real trouble. I made the place homey, with a TV to watch in the lobby. My mother used to give me management advice over the phone. “It pays to be personable,” she said.

At first my parents kept urging me to come back to Palm Beach. They gave up when it became clear to them that I was committed (as they put it) to looking constantly at unpleasantness. It was true I had lost whatever taste for luxury I’d had. Living on the street had done that to me, which is the reverse of what people think will happen.

I found my best job after I was fifty. I got hired to run a halfway house in Queens for guys coming out of prison, nonviolent offenders catching some fresh air before parole. It was a low-paying job — nobody cared that I hadn’t exactly finished college — in a rabbit-hutch of a home owned by an agency. I liked to tell everybody I was in another branch of the hospitality business, and in fact the job was a very good use to make of me. Not everyone wants to keep house for a bunch of beaten-down fuckups, but I liked it. On Christmas I played them carols on the clarinet.

When my mother died, not too long after my father, I took a large chunk of the money they left me and tried to start a foundation to help the newly paroled. Maybe I got grandiose. Part of me did it to concur with Norman, that fulminating old fart, who always reminded me in his letters that he’d never believed in prisons. What was I thinking? I had years of experience begging, borrowing, and stealing, but I’d never overseen a budget, and, as it happened, I was a financial dodo. I couldn’t seem to see my way clear about how to reserve funds for this and pay out for that — and my poor would-be foundation went broke before very long at all.

My sisters were more prudent and invested their share smartly, so that when they sent me photos in their emails, I could see Ellen’s son had added a spa and exercise center to the hotel and Gigi, old as she was, was driving around in a top-of-the-line Mercedes. Her hair was a quasi-humorous strawberry blond. Let them have this last surge of spending , I thought, since it makes them feel free . I had nothing against their feeling free, I of all people. They’d taken to sending me books for Christmas like The Total Money Makeover and A Guide to Prosperity . They pitied my really quite happy retirement to a small apartment in Sunnyside, Queens.

I was as horrified as anyone when I heard the news on the radio, before I heard it from them, about how everybody in Palm Beach, including them, was snookered by this investment guy with a Ponzi scheme. How irresistible they all must have been to him, thrilled at his promises, delighted to know him (my sisters always used his first name), happy to feel his coins fall into their eager hands. What he really, really knew was how very much they wanted what he pretended to get them.

Who doesn’t want money? I’d stopped wanting tons of it but I wasn’t beyond wishing. I could have been one of his clients, me too, one more moron, easy as that. My sisters were not comforted to hear this. Oh, Anthony. Their whole lives, they’d never thought they were fools and now they were, in front of everyone. “Plucked like chickens,” Ellen said. How did one guy make sixty billion dollars disappear? Gigi said, “It’s a nightmare. I don’t understand. Do you?” and I said (but they weren’t ready to hear), “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

When my father was in prison, my mother took us to visit him. I was nine when he first went in, and my sister was six. Some of my mother’s friends thought taking us there was a mistake. “The girls have to know,” my mother said. “They’re not too young. And why would I do that to Joe?”

My father was in Danbury, Connecticut, which my mother said was nicer than a lot of places, and he was there on principle. I knew what principle was. He was against the war, despite his despising Hitler and Hirohito as much as anyone ever could; he was against all wars waged by governments. He was against governments. He was an anarchist. Other people my parents knew went into the army as medics or did service at special camps, but not my dad, who wouldn’t register for the draft before the war even started. I had a fair idea what registration was, but my sister didn’t get it.

My mother dressed us nicely for these two-hour bus trips, in pleated skirts and Mary Janes, as if we were going all the way from Manhattan to visit a relative, which we were. We had never, of course, thought of our father this way, and Barbara, my sister, shrieked when she first saw him in those brown clothes that weren’t his, with his mouth a tight line in his face. “Get her shushed,” the guard said. “Or get her out of here. I’ll say it once.”

My father had an expression I’d never seen before, a wince of mortification. I made a zipping motion over my sister’s lips, sealing them. “Hey, muffins,” he said to us. We were in a visitors’ room with a bunch of wooden chairs and several other families in dramas of their own. Our mother made us tell him what we’d done in school — Barbara had learned the state capitals, and I had come in second in a spelling bee, after Maxie Pfeiffer, who thought she was the top of the world. “Second is good,” my father said.