New Year’s Babies

Joseph Christian Leyendecker wasn’t the first artist to use an infant to represent the new year. But over the span of 36 years, he made the New Year’s baby as familiar to Americans as Father Time.

A consummate illustrator — and mentor to Norman Rockwell — Leyendecker was continually searching for better ways to depict the holidays. He created many fanciful covers that caught the spirit of Christmas, Fourth of July, Easter, and Thanksgiving. But the New Year’s babies are arguably his most memorable.

The 1900s

His first baby was delivered for the December 29, 1906, issue of the Post. It shows a cherub atop a globe, turning over a fresh page in a book of New Year’s resolutions. The series continue without interruption until 1943.

Not only do the New Year’s covers showcase Leyendecker’s unmistakably realistic style, but each one insightfully captures the spirit of the times.

Look closely and you’ll notice that Leyendecker painted a baby in some years and a cherub in others. There doesn’t appear to be any logic to Leyendecker’s annual choice – except that, for some covers, his design sense required the figure to have wings.

1900s – Click cover to see larger image.

The 1910s

Starting in 1910, Leyendecker’s New Year covers began incorporating contemporary events. The 1910 cherub reflects America’s growing fascination with air travel and anticipates the country’s first airshow in Los Angeles. The 1912 baby takes up the cause for women’s suffrage. A flag-waving 1914 cherub celebrates the completion of America’s canal across Panama, which would open that August. The 1915 cherub tries to sweep the globe clean of the armies at war in Europe, represented by the military caps and helmets of the combatants. The 1917 cherub fretfully regards the explosive events in western Europe just three months before the U.S. enters World War I. A baby was seen reporting for duty in 1918, but in 1919, a cherub appeared, six weeks after the end of fighting, bearing the dove of peace.

The 1910s – Click cover to see larger image.

The 1920s

The ’20s saw the start of Prohibition, so Leyendecker’s first cherub of the decade wears a top hat – a reference to the well-known Prohibition cartoon character Mr. Dry – and carries a camel pull-toy symbolizing the long dry spell ahead for America. The 1921 cherub anticipates an end to the bitter coal miners’ strike in Alabama. The New Year’s baby trying to capture a dove – the symbol of peace – by salting it’s tail in 1922, is hoping for the Washington Naval Conference to reduce naval armaments among nine nations. The 1926 cherub anticipates the new Revenue Act, which reduced inheritance and income taxes. Sitting on the ark, the 1928 baby awaits the possible repeal of Prohibition, symbolized by “wet” weather. During a teetering economy in 1929, the New Year’s baby holds theatrical masks, uncertain of whether the coming year will be comic or tragic.

The 1920s – Click cover to see larger image.

The 1930s

Arriving just two months after the collapse of the stock market in 1930, the baby worried how he’d land in the new year. In 1933, he was recording a desired rise in stock prices. Wearing a businessman’s bowler hat in 1934, he nervously watched a growing pile of stock ticker tape, while the blue eagle of the National Recovery Act hovered over his shoulder. The cherub set out to negotiate 1935 on a fiscal tightrope, between the red ink of debt and the black ink of profit, while precariously balancing a budget on his head. No longer trying to work the numbers in 1936, the baby was looking for the return to prosperity in his crystal ball. Finally, in 1937, when America’s leading economic indicators were approaching late-1920s levels, the New Year’s baby allowed himself a little celebration. By 1938, he had returned, deep in thought, to the anvil he had been pounding in 1931.

The 1930s – Click cover to see larger image.

The 1940s

Although the country was at peace in 1940, Americans were growing worried that they would again be dragged into Europe’s conflict. The New Year’s baby was taking no chances. He arrived with his belongings packed, ready to move at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, he wore his gas mask and clutched an umbrella, a symbolic reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain whose assurances of “peace in our time” proved illusory. The 1941 baby was delivered by the armored fist of war.

The New Year’s baby of 1942 had probably been painted before Leyendecker heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7; the cover shows a wary New Year’s baby wearing a U.S. Army garrison cap and guarding the Western Hemisphere from the spread of European and Asian wars. By 1943, Leyendecker’s baby had come a long way from his early, innocent days. Awkwardly yet enthusiastically, he tears into the symbols of the Axis powers – the Japanese sun, the German swastika, and the Italian fasces. Unfortunately, Leyendecker didn’t continue his series to bring the New Year’s baby out of the war and into peace again. This was his 324th, and last, Post cover.

1940s – Click cover to see larger image.

A Week Proposal

Did you make an omelet during National Egg Week? Did your spouse stop biting his or her nails during National Pet Peeve Week? Do you plan to have a few close friends over to celebrate National Intimate Apparel Week? These and other national weeks were established to pay homage to the many things we take for granted in everyday life. There are national weeks for hobbies (National Gardening Week, National Karaoke Week, and National Bathroom Reading Week), professions (National Ventriloquism Week, National Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists Week, and National Clown Week), and food (National Pizza Week, National Split Pea Soup Week, and National Pickle Week), just to name a few.

The only problem with all of these festivals is that there are more national weeks than there are calendar weeks, over one hundred, not counting the ones like Be Nice to New Jersey Week, that don’t begin with the word “National.” The following are some observances that didn’t make the official list, and as long as we Americans don’t seem to mind doubling up on our national weeks, we should think about instituting some of them.

National Postal Service Week would feature official celebrations in all fifty states, at least three of which would be open at any one time. Presently, though, the U.S. Postal Service is reviewing this festival, trying to decide whether it should include celebrations on Saturday.

The people who proposed National Physicians Week thought we could commemorate it by sitting in our doctors’ waiting rooms for seven days, but abandoned the idea when they realized we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the festival and a normal appointment.

In observance of National Joke Week, a priest, a minister, and a rabbi would walk into a bar and have a conversation which, on the surface would seem to be religious, but which further scrutiny would show to be otherwise.

To celebrate National Proofreaders Week, editors across the country would check our spelling and grammars one more time to make sure our manuscripts are as well as they can be.

National Politicians Week would salute some true American heroes, our elected officials, and the challenging, selfless, and dedicated hard work they do every day, thinking only of us and our best interests.

National Sarcasm Week: see above.

The shortest of the celebrations, National Tolerance Week, would be held on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday only, because three days is about as long as Americans can stand people who are different. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday would become part of You Know What Your Problem Is? Week. Sunday, as always, would be reserved for religious observations, during which we would learn about how God wants us to respect and tolerate others.

During National Service Economy Week we would just stand in line for seven days while minimum-wage workers texted their friends instead of taking our fast food orders.

National Obsessive/Compulsive Week was meant to honor meticulous people. It was called off, however, when the Organizing Committee discovered that the Refreshment Committee had cut the sandwiches for the celebration across the middle, rather than on the diagonal, and had arranged the cups in separate stacks of red, white, and blue, instead of the alternating red, white, and blue pattern clearly called for in a special vote of the Rules Committee pursuant to Section 3, Paragraph 9 of the Bylaws on Eating Utensil Arrangement.

One of the simplest celebrations would be National Fan Appreciation Week, during which the superstars of sports would say thanks to their devoted fans by allowing the people who idolize them to visit their locker rooms, take their pictures, and buy their autographs.

National High School Graduates Week would feature parties in Duluth, Anaheim, Tallahassee, Baton Rouge, Council Bluffs, New York, and other cities most eighteen year-olds can’t find on a map.

Another event that people tried to put together was National Auto Mechanics Week, and at first they thought it would be relatively simple. Once they got into the planning, though, they discovered that there would be a lot more labor than they had originally thought, and that it would cost twice the original estimate. Besides, the week was supposed to start no later than noon on Saturday, but they wouldn’t be able to finish the preparations until the end of the workday Tuesday, Wednesday morning tops.

My college roommate’s mother knows a guy whose next-door neighbor’s uncle works with a woman whose nephew’s cousin’s sister-in-law dated a man who was one of the organizers of National Urban Legends Week. The observance was supposed to feature balloons in the shape of the alligators in the New York City sewer system, centerpieces made of exploding cacti, and a keynote address from the vanishing hitchhiker in the white dress. However, the week was called off when members returned to their cars to find bloody hooks from the arms of escaped murderers dangling from their door handles.

National Labor Relations Week will be only four days long this year as a result of an eleventh-hour agreement between labor and the organizers that narrowly averted its cancellation altogether. Next year, though, it will be nine days long, and in the third year of the contract will last ten and a half days.

National Teachers Week. Nah, forget it. They already get June, July, and August.

Of course, the cynics among us would argue that even the official national weeks are just blatant attempts by special interest groups to curry favor with a gullible public, and will put this country in the toilet. Luckily, if that ever happens, we already have National Scoop the Poop Week on the books. For these people I suggest National National Week Week, one national week in honor of all the other national weeks. This would allow them to get past all the hoop-la and get on with their lives. Yet, in a country that sets aside observances for laundry, school lunches, and condoms, who would notice if a few of the ones from this list made it into the record?

Bavaria’s Romantic Road

Where to stay, where to eat, and what to see in one of the most scenic regions of Germany: The Romantic Road stretches a little over 200 miles from Würzburg to Füssen. Starting from the north and ending at Neuschwanstein Castle and views of the alps is the popular route. For that very reason, this North-to-South path can get congested on the two lane road.

To avoid traffic, we suggest touring in the opposite direction, starting in Füssen.
Fly to …

MUNICH

And spend a night at Louis Hotel to overcome jet lag. While there, enjoy the rooftop terrace (and restaurant) that overlooks the famous 1807 Viktualienmarkt. Then, rent your vehicle of choice and begin your adventure! (Click here to read the travel essay “Bavaria for Lovers” from the January/February 2015 issue.)

FÜSSEN

Where to Stay

Where to Eat

Don’t Miss

Worth a Half-Day Visit: Nördlingen

Located in the center of a gigantic meteorite crater, this is the only town in Germany where visitors can walk completely around its walls and battlements. The late Gothic church St. George has a 295-foot tall bell tower which visitors are welcome to climb.

Worth a Half-Day Visit: Dinkelsbühl

Dating back over 400 years, this picturesque town with its patrician and enchanting semi- timbered houses and magnificent churches make it one of Germany’s best-preserved medieval towns.

ROTHENBURG OB DER TAUBER

The walled town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber is straight out of the late Middle Ages and is one of the most stunning towns on the Romantic Road. Brightly painted half-timbered houses with tall gable roofs line every cobblestone alleyway and square.

Where to Stay

Don’t Miss

Worth a Half-Day Visit: Wieskirche Church, Steingaden

The famous rococo “Church of the Scourged Saviour” or Wieskirche church was built in the mid 18th century and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Time your visit to a Sunday morning when the men’s choir sings.

AUGSBURG

Founded by Roman Emperor Augustus more than 2,000 years ago, this is one of Germany’s oldest cities. It’s economic highpoint came in the 15th and 16th centuries under the trading and banking activities of the Fugger and Welser families.

Where to Stay

Where to Eat

Don’t Miss

Worth a Half-Day Visit: Bad Mergentheim

Known as a health and spa vacation city, this Romantic Road city has an entire wellness park, flowering spa gardens, and an authentic Castle of the Teutonic Order, which includes a church and museum.

WÜRZBURG

Set in the heart of the Franconian wine region on the River Main, this city is dominated by the Marienberg Fortress and surrounded by vineyards. The Residential Palace is a UNESCO World Heritage Monument and there is also a magnificent Cathedral, Chapel of St. Mary and romantic Old Bridge over the River Main (complete with a bar in the center of the bridge).

Where to Stay

Where to Eat

Don’t Miss

Don’t Miss

  • Museum im Kulturspeicher
    This award winning museum showcases an outstanding collection of post-1945 European Concrete Art as well as an historical granary and Impressionist and Expressionist artworks.
  • For more information on Bavaria, visit bavaria.us
     

    5 Secret Uses for Tablets

    What do you use a tablet computer for? Web browsing? Facebooking? Binge-watching Netflix? All popular pastimes, certainly, but your slate is surprisingly versatile and capable of much, much more.

    1. Keep records: You don’t need a dedicated scanner to digitize paper documents. Today’s best-selling slates, including Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle, and Samsung’s Galaxy series, come with high-resolution cameras that can function as scanners. You’ll need an app to create scans (as opposed to photos). If you’re an iPad owner, check out Scanner Pro by Readdle, a $3 app that’s handy for digitizing paper notes, receipts, and multipage documents. Android users should try The Grizzly Labs’ $7 Genius Scan+ (also available for iOS). Both apps let you save scans directly to a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Evernote, or Google Drive. You can email or print scanned documents, too. Added bonus: You might find yourself scanning and sharing things you stumble upon when you’re out and about, such as a great restaurant menu or recipe.

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    American Volunteer Spirit

    over the course of the last 15 years or so, there’s been an explosion in the number of charter schools around the country. According to the latest figures (from 2012), some 2.1 million students are enrolled in schools run by private groups awarded public money. The schools bear optimistic names like YES Prep North Central (in Houston) and Ánimo Leadership High (in Inglewood, California). Beyond the specific concerns about education, the charter school movement is powered by a particularly American worldview, one rooted in the ethos of the dissident Protestant churches that were the foundation of early American culture: citizens opting out of a hierarchical system to pursue personal goals by joining together in a local, voluntary society.

    This ideological impulse — which I and others call voluntarism — is a cultural trait that helps explain why the United States remains different from comparable wealthy Western nations. Broadly speaking, voluntarism is not another term for American individualism, although it entails individualism. Voluntarism is the way Americans reconcile individualism and community. And we can feel the weight of American voluntarism in our approaches to public issues, not only in charter schools, but in debates about issues like “Obamacare” and gay marriage as well.

    Other Western nations, by contrast, consider healthcare a civil right of citizens and a moral obligation of government. American tradition, however, treats healthcare as an individual’s personal responsibility, or at least as a personal responsibility exercised through voluntary association, as in workplace health insurance. When the debate around gay marriage shifted from a discussion of God, gender, sex, and propriety to a debate over individual rights, tolerance, and the personal freedom of Americans to choose their partners, the struggle for marriage equality became easier.

    American voluntarism makes it hard for social-democratic reformers to persuade their fellow citizens to accept the types of ambitious state-run initiatives common in most Western democracies, such as universal healthcare, free preschools, and guaranteed labor rights. Conversely, the spirit of American voluntarism makes it harder for non-Americans to understand our public policies, which are often caricatured as being nakedly Darwinian.

    To read the entire article, pick up the January/February 2015 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands or …

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    The Three of Us

    Blonde woman leers at brunette looking at piano player
    Bitter Forfeit
    Coby Whitmore
    April 5, 1947
    © SEPS

    The first time I met Paula was at a launch party for John’s third volume on the Greeks, this one on Aristotle. Since I didn’t know him when he completed the first two, I felt no obligation to read them, thank God, because only Google and thumbing through some of Aristotle’s Poetics got me through the third and gave me enough courage to attend the party. John had not exaggerated his former wife’s looks. She had dark eyes and one of those rare beauty marks above one side of her upper lip, a small black dot — and it wasn’t superimposed. A glittering silver cord was worked into her hair and the braided black bundle secured with studded hairpins that caught the light as she moved her head in animated discussion. She was standing with three other professors I had met at an event days before where I was quickly outed as a flight attendant, having had nothing to contribute to a conversation about Boccaccio’s Decameron. A moment’s silence and species assessment ensued but John had counseled me of possible reactions to my career — especially from Paula — and now the moment had come for that introduction. Her hand came toward me and I took it, bringing together John’s ex and his talked-about in a slide of palms so fast that only someone pre-focused could have seen it.

    Read all the winning stories from the Great American Fiction Contest 2015:
     
    Winner

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    It was not Paula’s appearance that made me nervous. I was, as immodest as this is, a rather striking woman myself — all reddish hues in contrast to her raven ones — abundant auburn hair, hazelish eyes tending green, high cheek color and very nice, well, great full lips. We were both tall, she with distinctive proportions, I with flat alignment, but it suited me. No, what made me nervous was Paula’s Ph.D. and the view John said she’d have of my career. She got right to it.

    “I understand you’re a flight attendant, Laurie, or … Does anyone say stewardess anymore?”

    “Yes, I am. Yes, some people do say stewardess.”

    “Which do you prefer?” she said, half-smiling.

    “Either, or. It doesn’t matter.”

    Before she could continue, a Professor Debané joined us and I was introduced. His name and my agitation in facing Paula spurred me to jump on a possible opportunity and my voice came out like a border guard asking for papers. “Your name is French. Are you French, Professor Debané?” The question was artless and the delivery merited their laughter even though the professor spoke English like an American and could have been. I suddenly felt awkward and way out of my league. The professor responded that he was indeed French and asked if I had some familiarity with the language, without a hint of condescension in his voice or manner. I wanted to kiss him on both of his august cheeks for that and for handing me the hoped-for opportunity.

    “ Yes … I speak French,” I said. This declaration from an American is commonly illustrated in painfully accented classroom French, and although John was aware I sometimes used French, in the two months we had dated he had never heard me speak it. I could feel his blood ebb and Paula’s glee.

    “Oh, do you? Wonderful! We all speak some French here, so let’s have 15 minutes of immersion. It will be fun, like our summer in Provence, John,” she said and touched his arm. They exchanged a look and John edged closer to my side. “Arnaud hardly needs immersion in French,” he said, nodding toward Professor Debané and taking my hand. “Why don’t we just — ”

    “Oh, John, always so rational.” She turned her palms up in appeal to the others. There were no objections and she immediately addressed me in French, asking why I had become a flight attendant when today it was not glamorous and involved such unpleasant work, underscoring her disdain in the phrasing. She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head for my response, and all eyes were on me except John’s. He avoided my glances, shifted his weight, and began to squeeze my hand. Without his support, the professorial surround paralyzed me and I seemed to forget the situation and how I ended up the center of it. “Laurie?” Paula said. Her voice snapped me back, and I saw myself behind a rising screen, about to be revealed to a curious audience, and due to that overexcited image and four glasses of wine, I became autobiographical, beginning with the fourth grade where I first read about the pyramids and Africa’s animals and resolved to see them someday, then soared on to my senior year of college where the fourth-grade resolve still held.

    Paula’s dark eyes blinked at me as though trying to focus and John let go of my hand and made a half-turn putting me in his full view. The collective surprise was palpable. All my awkwardness blew away like fuzz on a dandelion leaving behind a sweet confidence, so I went on, rhapsodizing about being able to ski the slopes of Chamonix and Gstaad, meeting people of other cultures, seeing friends no matter where they lived. “All this — and at a discount,” I concluded.

    Mais alors, mademoiselle, vous êtes française!” Professor Debané said. I had emerged from the hoi polloi.

    I was not French, as Professor Debané assumed, but no one would think otherwise when I spoke it, thanks to my uncle’s wife Marie-Annick and her role in my upbringing. Americans who speak French with native fluency are accorded a higher status than those who speak fluent Czech, say, or Ukrainian, or almost any other more unique language, and my French went a long way at the launch party in compensating John for my career choice. It did not offend me that people found our relationship incongruous as I knew from the beginning that a 40ish, tenured, scholar of renown would have to squirm a lot with a flight attendant on his arm. On my side, however, presenting John was a delight. He stood 6 inches above me and had Kennedyesque looks and hair, a bonus to what intrigued me and made me proud to introduce him. He was an academic, and I had never before dated an academic.

    Several months later, we talked about marriage and it was then that John began to polish me up, and the polishing increased in September when he gave me a ruby engagement ring for our one-year anniversary. He made me aware that I regularly dropped consonants from words and that I used too many clichés. My taste in film was primarily good but some all-time favorites didn’t do me credit, such as Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn. It seemed I used quite a few words with political overtones — like bork — that some wouldn’t appreciate. And then there was the street where I lived — Goethe. I didn’t pronounce it correctly — that is as he and the Germans would have it pronounced. But a long time ago a Chicago cab driver told me there was no such street as Goethe and when I wrote it out for him said, “Sure, but you’re saying it wrong. That’s Gothee Street.” Who knows streets better than a cab driver? In front of John and friends, however, I thereafter resorted to German.

    Throughout this time of our progressing relationship and my upgrading, Paula emerged frequently in conversation and in person. She and John were married seven years so it was only natural for her name to come up, and she was, of course, at many of the academic and cultural events we attended. They still shared close friends from other cities, so we’d also meet for dinner when one of the couples came to Chicago, and Paula would inevitably work in great times the four had shared and get in a remark at my expense. If there was the slightest possibility a conversation might lead to things French, she’d contort it in another direction with admirable aplomb, denying me the one area where I could shine. It was clear she would never forgive me for speaking fluent French without an American accent or for having a job that tainted her former husband’s scholarly esteem. At these encounters Paula always looked stunning, often wearing her long hair straight with one narrow silver-corded braid ornamenting the right side. I couldn’t help but notice she wore John’s favorite perfume, a Dolce and Gabbana fragrance, the same one he had given me for my 31st birthday along with a subscription to The New York Times. Eventually, I asked John to do something about Paula’s jabs, but he said it was best not to stir up trouble — which hurt a bit — and I realized I’d have to stop her myself by responding in kind. In December, I began.

    We were meeting a couple from Pittsburgh and Paula and her date Stephen at Tesori for dinner before the symphony. Upon arrival I ran into Paula in the restroom using a hairpin to adjust her silver cord. We made a bit of small talk and, as she was leaving, she called back over her shoulder: “Still flying?”

    My body tensed and I rapidly finger-combed my hair while watching her profile in the mirror.

    “Yes, still teaching?” I said, echoing her tone.

    fiction_contest_call_to_action

    She stopped short with her hand on the door … and walked out. Still at the mirror, I saw my mouth release a long breath, then come together in a smile which sent me back to the bottom of an Austrian ski slope. I was being applauded by ski bums after completing a run of moguls and smiling a triumphant smile, the same one smiling at me now.

    Dinner went well even with politics dominating the conversation, not unusual when persuasions are the same. Their passion in discussing the results of the November elections made it easy for me to be a fringe participator with rare interjections to keep me in and out, as it were. After dessert orders, the Pittsburgh couple went to the lobby to call their children and nanny, and Stephen went to the restroom. There we were — the three of us — and I did it. I used the word “candidate,” sans the first “d”. I blushed, stumbling over the breach, and Paula spoke.

    “John said you were working on consonants.”

    “Paula — ”

    “I didn’t realize you reproduced our conversations, John,” I said, looking at him. An icy anger lifted all embarrassment and the mogul skier took over.

    Can.di.datecan.di.date. There! Now you two need to work on squirrel. Repeat after me: é. cu. reuil — oh never mind, here’s Stephen. Another time.”

    My December defense didn’t sit well with John and he excused Paula on the grounds that she was Paula, but before he could say I overreacted — the sure goal of his mesmerizing voice and rhetoric — I reminded him that I had asked him to subdue her and now it was up to me. It was the first time I had not deferred to him, and it took him aback but not as much as what was to come two weeks later on New Year’s Day. He had become edgy during those two weeks and I felt it related to being unable to rely on me anymore for restraint with Paula. It caused me twinges of guilt because I wasn’t sure if he wouldn’t or just couldn’t restrain her and now he had me to boot. I don’t recall what we were talking about on January 1, but it led to my telling him my friend’s aunt lost her bid for a judgeship. “She was borked, plain and simple.” John exploded — I had used the bork word. Then I exploded — and with encyclopedic recall.

    Not so fast, Professor — by the way, that’s a cliché from Private Benjamin, one of my favorite movies — ” and I went on and on, ending with “ … and all those consonants I’ve been putting in to please you? Well I’m taking them all out again.” I don’t think I forgot a single upgrade and John stared at me and I stared back, both with wide-eyed disbelief.

    We hardly saw each other the next few weeks. I had bid my flight schedule in order to be free for a performance at The Logan Center that I had a deep interest in attending. It would be an evening of songs and poems by Robert Burns, a poet dear to my heart, and I even looked forward to drinks afterward with Paula and Stephen and another couple. I could hold my own on Robbie Burns and wanted to. My father used to read him to me, doing the Scottish accent very badly, but I didn’t know it then and thought his rendition fantastic. The weather caused cancellations of several of my return trips and John had a trip himself to Cleveland, but finally we blocked off three days to be together. I spent two of those days and nights at John’s apartment in Lakeshore East, something I rarely did because his one-bedroom apartment did not accommodate my erratic sleep or flying schedules. Things hadn’t jelled for us to where they had been before the recent unpleasant episodes. For one thing, the professor-student side of our relationship was over, and we both knew it, but we were finding a footing and had a wonderful 48 hours. We skated in Millennium Park, wobbling around the ice, and sat in the Park Grille afterwards, drinking wine and watching others skate. We took several long walks on Michigan Avenue braving the cold and wind, went grocery shopping at Mariano’s and ate dinner in, cooking two great ones together. On January 26, the day of the Burns performance, John got up to go to Eggy’s for breakfast with a friend and I lingered, waving good-bye with the ruby-ringed hand that he kissed and placed back under the duvet. Soon after he left, I got up and made coffee and while it perked stood at the living-room window looking out over blue patches of lake that winter couldn’t overcome. On the beach, a bulldog attacked a huge snow sculpture destroying it beyond identification, and two joggers stopped to watch as a couple tried to rein him in. I followed the shoreline up to the planetarium and then came back into the warmth of John’s apartment with its wall-to-wall books and coffee-laden air and breathed in bliss. We had cancelled his cleaning lady the day before so after dressing I tidied up between cups of coffee and glancing at the Times. When I raised the shades in the bedroom and began to strip the bed, something flashed over my eyes. The mattress was down from the rim of the headboard and sunlight rays were interacting with an object behind it. Glitter … glitter … glitter … the silver cord from Paula’s hair.

    That evening I stood in front of my bathroom mirror knotting a tartan scarf I bought to wear in honor of Burns and wondering why I couldn’t cry. Before leaving John’s apartment I had readjusted the sheets on his bed, made it, packed my overnight bag, left him a note, and walked all the way to Goethe Street without noticing the cold, my face so numb that I couldn’t return a greeting from the doorman. Inside my apartment I sat on the sofa in my coat and shook from cold and betrayal. I wanted to cry but tears didn’t come.

    I took off the scarf, tried it another way, and remembered things, reviewed them, things I hadn’t previously registered. A poem began turning in my mind and I jerked off the scarf and replaced it as it was the first time, then went to my desk for a sheet of old stationery with a picture of me and a sweet old lion, my arm over his shoulders. It was taken in Africa and John said it was one of those “Here I am with someone in someplace” pictures. From a shelf I lifted a book of Burns’ poetry left me by my father and copied the first stanza of a poem.

     

    The Burns presentation was magical and resonated with past and present memories, and the tears wanted earlier came. I brushed at them and John reached for my hand. I let him take it just as I had accepted his kiss in greeting me that evening. It was someone else lending her lips, her hand. After the performance, my plan to plead an early flight, hand him the poem and silver cord and jump into a cab was exchanged for one far better. Stephen had a flu virus and hadn’t come and Raica and Gregory had to leave right after the performance so the three of us cabbed to Michigan and Randolph and ordered Glenlivet in Tavern at the Park. “Ahhh. What an evening!” John said, picking up his scotch and proposing a toast to Burns.

    As they sipped their toast, I swallowed all of mine, set the glass down and pulled an elongated silver-wrapped box from my purse. “This belongs to you, Paula.” Their expressions, bemused by my drinking off the scotch, stiffened, and I reached for the poem. “And this … this is for you, John, but it also alludes to Paula.” They were stone quiet as I unfolded the lion stationery and read with the Scottish accent inherited from my father:

    TO A LOUSE

    Ha! Whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
    Your impudence protects you sairly’
    I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
    Owre gauze and lace;
    Tho’, faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
    On sic a place.

    I placed the poem on the table, pulled off the ruby ring to anchor it, and walked away. SEP Logo Reverse

     

    2015 Great American Fiction Contest Winner: “Omeer’s Mangoes”

    Bryant Park
    The park became a testament to progress, to how things got steadily better over time, like the opposite of entropy, where he had read that things naturally fall apart. (Shutterstock)

    IIn the decades that Omeer had lived and worked across from Bryant Park, everything had changed for them both, for the park and for him. Omeer had married and had a son, and the marriage had devolved from love to disappointment to peace, finally settling into something that could be described most charitably as a kind of permanent calm. And the park. Well.

    It had always officially been called Bryant Park, but when Omeer first arrived in New York City, the park was dangerous, avoided. His first New York friend, Angelo, who had been hired to polish the brass in the lobby of Omeer’s building, told him that some people called it Needle Park. Angelo was wise, and waved his filter-less cigarette knowingly at homeless people sleeping in the park. “He lives there.” He pointed with the burning end of his cigarette. “He washes in the fountain and uses the bushes as a toilet. You can smell it from here. And some of them push needles in their arms and when they nod off, the needles fall on the ground. It’s a park that grows needles, see?” He laughed, two plumes of smoke pouring from his nostrils like a dragon.

    Read all the winning stories from the Great American Fiction Contest 2015:
     
    Winner

    • “Omeer’s Mangoes”
      by N. West Moss

     
    Runners-Up

    Omeer, a doorman in a building that looked out on the park, watched from across the street as the prostitutes in stretchy, sparkling dresses came at night and walked on high heels up behind the hedges. It was a dark place in those years, a wasteland.

    But none of it upset Omeer, who, as a young man was full of hope, all forward momentum and open arms. New York City, even the park with the dirty condoms and sad women, thrilled him. He had a job and a uniform too, brown with brass buttons, and his tenants did not sleep in the park. His tenants back then were celebrities and artists, nice people who brought him coffee in the morning and seemed embarrassed to have the door held open for them day after day. The building, his building, was beautiful, so elegant with its wide marble staircase and brass elevator doors, polished every month by Angelo and his father. It did not matter that Needle Park was across the street. Omeer’s building was an oasis of kindness and beauty that shamed the park, not the other way around.

    The people in the building in those early decades were like Omeer’s family. He knew which one was expecting a grandchild, which one was contemplating divorce. One tenant was a radio personality, another was an artist who always had paint in his hair, and one wrote music for the movies. Imagine that! They thanked him constantly and gave him tips at Christmas.

    Omeer used to stand on the top step of the stoop at dawn and watch the park for rats beneath the boxwoods. He knew they were boxwoods because he had asked Mrs. Dennis from the 12th floor. She had been so beautiful then, too, a model for Clairol; her blond hair and face had been so sweet and pretty that Omeer turned away when she said hello. The Dennises were older than Omeer, and he thought of them with respect, as the stars who would play his parents in the movie version of his life, which would be set in New York City, not Iran, where he had been born.

    Omeer’s real father had once been a businessman, before they all left Iran and scattered. At first Omeer told him the truth about his work, about the building, the uniform, the clusters of grapes carved above the doorways in the lobby. His father seemed proud, thought it was a good beginning for his son. Omeer imagined his father telling his friends in England, where he had settled, that his son lived in New York City, that his son was a doorman who wore a uniform with polished brass buttons. His father offered Omeer advice on the phone the first Thursday of every month, about saving money and meeting Iranian girls in New York.

    After Omeer’s mother died, and it became clear that his father would never come to America, not even to visit, Omeer began to lie to him. His father wanted more for him than a doorman job, which had been fine for a few years, but was no longer enough. When Omeer told him he was looking for a new job, his father said, “Good man! You must always strive to better yourself,” and Omeer remembered then how nice it was to be far away from his father’s knack for success.

    Omeer made up stories that his father could share with friends over cards, but Omeer’s honest heart made him an unimaginative and nervous liar. He fabricated interviews he was going on, and outfits the interviewers wore, and because he wanted his father to think kindly of America, Omeer said that some of the interviewers expressed interest in Iran, and one even asked about Omeer’s father, supposedly, which of course no one would ever have done.

    This false interview period stretched to months, and in an attempt to keep the stories interesting, Omeer moved the interviews to restaurants, although Omeer had never eaten in a restaurant, other than the pizza place on the corner. He described one interview for his father, saying, “I ordered a steak and it came with three different kinds of potatoes and a bowl of apricots for dessert.” He hesitated. “And pots of tea. Pots of hot, sweet tea.” This was how Omeer thought someone in England by way of Iran might picture an American meal, different in the potatoes, but similar in the apricots and pots of tea.

    He saved his money, ironing his own shirts, making cheese sandwiches in his tiny kitchen and eating them standing up with the TV on. He wanted a family, he told his father, and himself. Yes, he would love to have enough money one day to have a wife.

    Finally, Omeer felt he had to tell his father that he had gotten a new job from all of these interviews he had gone on. He couldn’t pretend to go on interviews forever, so he said that he had been hired at a bank, even though Omeer knew nothing about finance or banks or what kind of job he’d even get in one. Angelo said, “Tell him it’s in public relations. Everyone works in public relations. Call it PR,” which Omeer’s father seemed to understand, even if Omeer did not. That was early still, in his first decade in New York, when Omeer made it a habit to sweep the sidewalk in front of the building very early, before his tenants even woke up, without even being asked.

    It was after Omeer became a make-believe public relations agent at a bank that the park across the street began to change in earnest. It got roped off with police tape, and in rumbled cranes and dump trucks, dumpsters and jackhammers. Omeer and Angelo kept track of the tearing down and the carting away and then watched as the park was rebuilt. For four entire years the park was a noisy mess. Omeer and the other doormen swept and mopped every day to keep the dust from polluting their marble lobby.

    Omeer read about the renovations in the paper. They were planning on lowering the park to ground level. Astonishing. Impossible. The papers said it was dangerous to have a park up higher than the street, because good people were too scared to go in. “If it’s not at eye level,” Angelo explained to him, “the police can’t look in. It’s like a secret world where all sorts of things can happen. You don’t want to know.” Angelo shook his head, took off his work hat and rubbed his hands through his hair to show how upsetting it was in there.

    When Angelo’s father retired, Angelo was put in charge of the family business, polishing the elevator doors, the brass bannisters that looped up the grand marble staircase, the handles on the front doors. He and Omeer stood outside so that Angelo could smoke, and later, after Angelo left, Omeer would sweep up the filter-less cigarette butts and matches he’d left on the ground.

    Omeer read to Angelo from the newspaper about the park, while Angelo commented. “People hide in the park,” said Angelo.

    “Right,” said Omeer, “the addicts and the hookers.” He tried to sound disdainful, but it didn’t work and he was embarrassed that he had said the word hooker out loud. Angelo had disdain for specific things: for sloppy carpentry, and for people who ate pizza while they walked down the street, but Omeer couldn’t muster genuine disdain. It simply was not in his nature, although he tried.

    When the construction was finally done and the dust was hosed off of the block, when the park had been successfully lowered, Omeer called it a work of art. “It’s magnificent,” he would murmur to his tenants as he held the front door for them and swept his hand across the vista, the marble handrails, the full flowerbeds. He realized he was bragging as though the park were his, and he blushed over and over again, but he couldn’t stop paying compliments to it.

    Men in green jumpsuits came next and put in more plants, thousands of them along with full-grown London plane trees. Stonemasons came too and fixed the paths and stone walls. Old statues were polished and new statues went in. Now, years later, gardeners were in the park every day in the spring and summer, and even into the fall, planting begonias and digging up daffodils that had just finished blooming, slipping hoses into each pot of flowers until the water ran over the top and soaked the slate beneath. There was a man in a green uniform whom Omeer knew by sight. He walked all day long pushing a garbage can on wheels. If someone let a napkin fall to the ground, the man was there, seconds later, to put it in his pail. If a leaf fell from a tree, he caught it.

    The park became a testament to progress, to how things got steadily better over time, like the opposite of entropy, where he had read that things naturally fall apart. It made Omeer tremendously hopeful, about the park, about his life, about humanity. What they had done to the park was a triumph over entropy. He said that to Angelo, who shrugged.

    Omeer got married the year the restaurant went into the park. What a shock it had been to his tenants to learn that there would be a place to have lunch and dinner right there, steps from their front door, butting up against the back of the New York Public Library. Mrs. Dennis from the 12th floor said, “It’s like living at Versailles,” which Omeer had heard of. It made everyone in the building stand up a little straighter to have a park so lovely.

    On Thursday nights the restaurant hosted a singles’ night where skinny men and women in their tight business clothes came in waves. Omeer could see them through the glass of the front door, laughing with their mouths wide open, leaning in to one another, talking into their phones when their dates went to the rest room. Always busy, always important.

    He walked over and studied the menu that hung in the window, and saw a bottle of wine for sale for $47. He felt rich just seeing that, proud that they thought so highly of themselves. The neighborhood had become as special as Omeer’s beautiful marble-and-brass building, as if the building had finally succeeded in making the park behave.

    He cut out newspaper articles about the park and sent them to his father, telling him that he went to the restaurant there for business lunches, that the bank let him put it on his expense account. He wished he hadn’t lied to his father about being a banker, because he wanted to tell him how he had just been promoted to superintendent of the building, a big step up. His father would probably have been proud, would have congratulated him. When he got the promotion, Omeer had his doorman uniform cleaned professionally. He hung it in its dry-cleaning bag in the back of his closet in case he ever needed it again.

    Omeer’s wife was American, with enough Persian blood in her family history for him to consider her essentially Iranian. She was younger than he was, and shy when they first met. She moved into his apartment with him, the little one bedroom he had bought on the top floor when prices had been dirt-cheap. She bought paint the color of bricks and pomegranates and painted the walls. She put out a vase of fake flowers that looked real. To Omeer, she had the eye of an artist. He encouraged her in all of her early tentativeness. He took her to the park on his day off and showed her the menu hanging in the restaurant window, pointed at the $47 bottle of wine listed there, and they turned to each other and made shocked faces.

    One day, a carousel appeared in the park, and reporters wrote stories about it, which Omeer cut out. But by then, his father had died and Omeer put the clippings from the newspapers in the bottom of his sock drawer with a heavy heart. It was the same year that his wife, grown less shy by this time, gave birth to their son. Progress, as it always had for Omeer, outweighed the setbacks. He had a son now. He had a family of his own.

    And then, soon after that, at no particular moment, without being definite or clear, at a time seen only in retrospect as a moment, a year later or maybe two or three after the birth of his son, the pendulum of Omeer’s life which had been swinging steadily forward along with the good fortune of Bryant Park, halted, stuttered, and began, ever so slowly, to swing backwards, as every life does eventually. As his up-hill resolved itself eventually into a downslope, the pendulum of the park continued its seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory.

    As he grew older, Omeer had begun to worry about his graying hair. He became afraid of closed spaces, and in his late 40s began to sleep with the blinds open to let in the street light, fearful of the coffin-feeling of waking up swallowed by darkness. It annoyed his wife, who liked to sleep without interruptions from light or noise or, by then, from a hand reaching out for her in the night.

    Omeer, unlike his wife, found sweetness in interruptions. Everything else was just a list of chores that repeated with the days of the week. Interruptions were the music. Omeer wanted to please his wife, and this made him worry about eating too much salt and drinking too much caffeine. He worried about his blood pressure because she told him to. “We’re getting old,” she said, filing down the nail on her index finger, although she did not look old. He had seen her gray hairs one morning over breakfast, but by that night, her hair was black again. “It’s time you began to take care of yourself, Omeer.” He liked it when she said his name.

    Omeer was aware of his age. His tooth ached. His knee ached, but still he was surprised, over and over again, by his reflection in the glass front door of the building. He expected to see his shiny black hair, his eyes smiling back at him, but was forced instead to ask, “Who is that old man?” followed by, “Ah, this is who I’ve become.”

    All of New York City had changed too as Omeer grew older. Midtown had been “cleaned up,” but the park, its transformation had been unimaginable, breathtaking, and Omeer had quietly borne witness as they began to offer free yoga classes in the park and French lessons. They held poetry readings and chess tournaments there. In summer they showed movies and offered free juggling classes. Juggling classes!

    One winter it was announced that the park would house a skating rink. His wife didn’t believe him at first. “They can’t fit a skating rink in that little park,” she said. So he brought her there, with their boy who was still in her arms then. They were both stunned, but there it was. “Visionaries,” Omeer said. He and his wife clutched their son, making a fragile little family unit. They watched the people wheeling around the rink, bundled in their new clothes from the GAP, spotlights shining down on them as if they were gods. Omeer and his wife looked at each other and laughed then. It was not just a dream, Omeer knew, because the next year the rink came back and brought with it a Christmas tree as tall as a skyscraper. It took a truck with a ladder on it to hang the star on the tree’s top.

    As the park and the neighborhood blossomed, however, the kindness of the people seemed pushed to the side, as though kindness was the price that had to be paid for progress. Omeer, then, looked back on those early years, before the park had been renovated, with some nostalgia. Some of his good tenants moved out and new, driven ones moved in. The new ones wore ties and never looked up, and became annoyed quickly. Some of the old tenants remained, and as they aged, he cared for them like he would have cared for his own father, helping them into cabs, carrying their mail upstairs for them, bowing a tiny bit when they came in.

    Mr. Dennis, for example, used to ride his bicycle all over Manhattan. He had been famous then on the radio, and Omeer told people, “He is an excellent man, a perfect man.” But Mr. Dennis had grown old and slow like everyone else, and had finally collapsed in the lobby, nearly killing Omeer with shame and worry. He knelt next to him, murmuring, “Oh, Mr. Dennis, Mr. Dennis, I’m so sorry,” too shy to take the man’s hand. The people he admired disintegrated like everyone else, and it broke Omeer’s heart. No one was immune.

    Filling the park with flowers and trees and folding chairs, making it so beautiful, brought smart, angry tenants to Omeer’s building — lawyers and traders from Wall Street. The new board president wore blue ties that were tied too tightly around his fat neck. His face was always red, strangled by his own ties, like a balloon about to pop. He looked at Omeer with suspicion, as though Omeer wasn’t working hard enough, which caused Omeer to feel confused and apologetic. He took such pride in his work. Angelo told him only to sweep up when tenants were watching so they could see how hard he worked. It wasn’t terrible advice.

    A hotel went in next door to Omeer’s building, and a magazine shop on the other side, next to a French coffee shop that sold pepper grinders and extra-virgin olive oil. The tenants got fancier too, wanted more things, had more packages delivered and cleaning women and guests arriving. People moved in and out more frequently.

    Angelo still came, but they refused to raise his fee when they required him to polish the marble floor in addition to his other jobs, and so he was always in a rush too, like everyone else. The board president with the red face and tight neckties told Omeer that they were letting go of one of the other doormen, “to cut costs.” Omeer would have to do his superintendent work during the day now, get his uniform out of the closet again to work occasional overnights, and “share the burden” as the board president told him, not making eye contact with Omeer. They didn’t care that Omeer had a little boy. Times were hard. If he wanted to stay, to keep his apartment, this is what he’d have to do. Omeer considered it a demotion.

    By the time Omeer’s boy could make his own bowl of cereal in the morning without spilling the milk, Omeer’s wife had lost her reticence entirely. Omeer became aware that his wife and son pitied him, and sometimes were angry at him for making them pity him, back and forth, pity, anger.

    Omeer’s hair had begun to come in gray by his temples, and his wife was bored at home, now that their boy didn’t need much from her. She had friends too, American friends, and she told Omeer that she wanted to go back to school. So Omeer smiled, nodded, and mortgaged the apartment, the one that he had paid off completely, and he sent his wife to design school at Parsons. She took his hands in hers. “Thank you, Omeer.” He loved it when she said his name. He had made her happy.

    She studied hard and came home exhilarated. He was glad for her as if she were his growing daughter. When she graduated, he and their son went to the ceremony. At the coffee shop afterward, with her much younger school friends, one of them said, “The economy is not good for designers just starting out.” His wife had shrugged.

    She got a new hairstyle, even made her clothes for a bit on a sewing machine Omeer bought for her, but soon after she graduated and found the reality of getting a job to be quite different from the dream, she became disenchanted by the fashion shows that were still held in the park then.

    “Oh!” she said, “The beep beep beep of those trucks backing up! How do they expect people to live here?”

    After being demoted, Omeer went three years without a raise. Their bills went up, though, and they had a mortgage now. His wife was forced to take a part-time job at a dry cleaner’s downtown, to her great dismay. He knew that her failure was his failure.

    The board president with the blue ties and red face explained that they couldn’t give raises, and not to expect one any time soon, either. “There are plenty of people who’d be happy to do your job for half of what you make,” he told Omeer, which struck Omeer as probably true. He worked hard, though, and loyalty should count for something. Shouldn’t it?

    As his financial strains intensified, Omeer made sure to remain kind. It was not his wife’s fault that she had married a man who would remain a doorman forever. When she came home with new lipstick, he told her how pretty she was. He did not want anything to make him like the board president with the tight ties. Being kind made him feel better. He loved how smart his wife was, how much she seemed to know. He liked her new long nails, and the way she tapped them gently against her coffee cup in the morning as she read the paper.

    He felt guilty about his own graying hair, imagined that it embarrassed her and their boy. He asked her if she wanted him to dye it black and she laughed. “Why bother?” she said. He felt her recoil from her own comment, and she added, “You look distinguished like this.” Omeer knew that she gave him the compliment because she didn’t love him anymore. It wasn’t her fault. Love just grew or failed, and her love for him had stalled out.

    One day, his son came to him with a flyer from middle school that read “Summer Music Camp.” He had been studying the saxophone, which caused Omeer distress. He didn’t want the boy to practice when it would disturb tenants. But now this. He didn’t have the $500 for music camp but wanted to say yes to the boy. He said, “Money’s tight this year,” and he saw the boy’s eyes get small and suspicious.

    “Mom gets to go out all the time,” the boy said.

    “Yes?” said Omeer.

    “You are just a cheap-skate,” the boy said, and Omeer recognized the term as something his wife used.

    Omeer was so ashamed that he went to the bank the next morning and took the $500 out of his almost-empty savings account. He told his son that he could go, that he had found the money. The boy shrugged, not believing him. “No,” said Omeer, “I mean it. I am not a cheap steak.” He knew immediately that he’d said it wrong. He made mistakes when he was nervous. He had pictured the conversation going so much better, had imagined that his boy would smile and thank him for his generosity, but now Omeer felt frantic and hopeless and embarrassed. The boy rolled his eyes and sighed derisively, and something came up out of Omeer’s stomach and into his throat that he couldn’t control. He didn’t realize what he was doing until after he had slapped the boy BAM! across his cheek.

    They stared at each other while the slap reverberated. Omeer knew it had happened because his hand stung, and because the boy’s cheek bloomed pink. He wanted to apologize, wanted to beg the boy not to tell his mother, but instead Omeer took the elevator to the basement and stood in the dark near the incinerator, catching his breath, keeping the tears that gathered inside his eyes.

    It was the summer of the slap that someone hired pianists to play music during lunch hour at Omeer’s end of the park. The piano was on wheels so it could be moved around. Pianists came every weekday, a new one each week, and sat down at the piano with a flourish, playing show tunes and jazz and sometimes classical to entertain the crowds. Omeer took his lunch there almost every day. He listened right until the end, even if there was an encore, and then he’d rush across the street, up to his apartment, change into his doorman’s uniform, and be at the front desk for the 3 o’clock shift.

    Omeer recognized the park employees who cleaned the fountain who would sometimes stop and listen to the music too, leaning on their brooms. Their uniforms were green, like the color of the leaves, as though they grew there in the park, the workers.

    He became aware of a woman who visited the park every Tuesday. She dragged a suitcase, wrapped entirely in Saran Wrap, and several purses, all wrapped in cellophane too. She wore a rain hat tied under her chin, and her lipstick went outside of the lines on her lips up to her nose almost. She would settle in by the piano and arrange her purses on separate chairs. Then she would unwrap a sandwich from a piece of tin foil and eat it.

    She never made a sound, never caused a disturbance, always cleaned up after herself. She and Omeer were companions of sorts on Tuesdays that summer. As Omeer would be getting up to leave at the end of each Tuesday concert, she would be stacking her purses back on her suitcase and wheeling off toward home, her plastic kerchief tied tightly under her chin. She even pushed the chairs back in.

    Omeer looked forward to that hour, rain or shine. It became his club, his piece of the park where he was better off than some, and not as well off as others. Even though he never spoke to people there, outside of a polite nod, he felt they were his friends, a kind of family that might have existed given better circumstances. How much they would like him if they knew him, he thought. How kind he’d be to them, laughing at their jokes. They wouldn’t know that he was a disappointment, because he wouldn’t tell them. He would not divulge how much money he owed, how he owed more on the apartment than it was worth, that his wife worked part time at a dry cleaner’s. They would not know about him slapping his son, or hiding in the basement afterward. They would know the Omeer that he wished to be — kind, generous, loyal, appreciated.

    He had a favorite table in the shade — close enough to hear the music but far enough away to watch the people, who came in colored scarves and high-heeled shoes and danced with their children under the pale green branches of the plane trees. They all spoke different languages, and like chips of glass in a kaleidoscope, whatever way they happened to fall, Omeer found beautiful — like his wife and son when they didn’t know he was watching them.

    fiction_contest_call_to_action

    When the long, hot month of August came, it brought a new woman to the piano concerts. She came barreling in one day, her shiny black hair pulled into a ponytail. Her clothes were runner’s clothes, skintight and lime green. Her enormous fat rolls spilled out from underneath her shirt, smooth and round as a wet otter. Omeer was charmed. Her cheeks were round and glossy, and she shone, as though she had rubbed her skin with oil. She seemed quite alive. When Omeer pointed her out to Angelo one day, Angelo said, “She looks like a Samoan. I’ve read about them. They paddle canoes in the Arctic.” Omeer looked up Samoan on his son’s computer and was astonished at how wrong Angelo had been, but from then on Omeer thought of her as “the Samoan” anyway.

    She came after that every so often, and Omeer was glad when she showed up, like a mountain had rolled in to keep the wind and sun off of his back. One day early on, she had a tight lemon-yellow shirt on that did not cover her belly, a strip of which was revealed, the color of polished teak. She put her belongings on one of the round tables and stood next to it, doing stretching exercises. Every time she reached up, her belly, hanging over her pants was exposed, rich and coffee-colored. She looked like a warrior to Omeer, or a fertility goddess.

    She sat then and pulled a see-through plastic container full of sliced mangoes out of a bag. She burst with vitality, eating fruit for lunch, doing stretching exercises, her new sneakers a glowing talisman for physical fitness. It all seemed very Samoan to Omeer. She ate the mango with her fingers, licking them after each slice. She took a Wet-Nap out of her purse when she was done and carefully wiped her hands. Fastidious. Natural.

    Each time she arrived, she stretched until her belly button was exposed. And when she stopped reaching, the shirt stayed up while she sat and ate her mangoes. Omeer was giddy over how unselfconscious she was, how brave and relaxed and accepting of her own self. He was so much the opposite that he used mouthwash every morning, every night, after every meal, and still his wife pulled away. But his Samoan, she left her fat belly exposed in the middle of the park, and he was sure that everyone who saw her must love her for her abandon.

    One day she looked up from a dripping mango slice and caught Omeer’s eye. She hesitated and then smiled wide to show all of her top teeth. He felt he had been caught staring at her, and he stood up, walking directly out of the park and up to his building, where he saw his reflection in the front door of his building. He was shocked, as though he had just seen himself for the first time in decades. How his eyelids drooped. How tight his pants were around his waist. He remembered a photograph of himself when he had been the Samoan’s age, with a full head of shiny black hair. He had been handsome then, he now realized. His daydreams had allowed him to be mistaken about who he had become. Omeer had thought himself the man who might have known this girl once, been friends with her, if things had been different, if he had not married and accidentally grown old.

    The next morning, Omeer went to the deli and bought himself a little container of sliced mangoes, and the cashier gave him a plastic fork. He hadn’t eaten a mango since he was a little boy, and he ate them now for lunch by the piano, one at a time. The mango was strange, fibrous and sweet, and full of vague, echo-y memories from what felt like a life that once belonged to someone else, someone who had lived a hundred years ago. It was not enough food for him, and he knew he’d be hungry that night behind the front desk, and he was disappointed that the Samoan woman wasn’t there to see him.

    The next day, at the same deli, Omeer bought himself a box of men’s hair dye, the kind that promised to subtly cover only some of the gray, to make him look just a bit younger. He hid the box in the drawer by his bed and dyed his hair when his wife and son had gone out. Some of the dye splattered on the wall by the light switch. He scrubbed it with his toothbrush and got the spot off, but the toothbrush was ruined.

    When Omeer took the towel off of his head, he wasn’t certain, but he sensed he looked different, very subtly so. It made his eyes look more blue, he thought, turning his head from side to side in front of the mirror. It left some of the gray, maybe almost all of it, he couldn’t tell, which he found tasteful. He had been worried that the change would be alarming, too severe, but it wasn’t. How could anyone accuse him of dyeing his hair when there were patches of gray still in it?

    He wrapped his toothbrush and the box from the hair dye in a plastic bag, and instead of throwing it down the garbage chute by the elevator, he carried it down and put it in a garbage can on the street. He went back to the deli to get mangoes for lunch again. Yes, he had been hungry the night before, but perhaps it was not the end of the world to be a bit hungry. He could stand to lose a few pounds, and mangoes were delicious, he had decided. They tasted the way perfume smelled.

    To his delight, the Samoan girl was already there when Omeer took his seat. The pianist was playing something that sounded like a show tune, and a little girl was twirling to the music. A faint chill was in the air, which reminded Omeer that yet another fall was coming. He waited for his Samoan to see him, wondering if she would notice his hair. When she did finally look, he held up his plastic container of mango like a prize to show her, and she smiled and held her container of mango up too, like a toast. He purposefully did not look in her direction again, so that she would know he was not trying to be intrusive, filled with reigned-in joy as he was.

    Omeer was working the door when his son came in that evening. The boy was carrying his saxophone case in one hand, said, “Hi,” and lingered. The lobby was quiet and the sun was still up, but weakly.

    “How was camp today?” Omeer asked.

    “OK,” the boy said, not looking at him.

    “Would you like to eat your dinner down here behind the desk with me?” He hadn’t asked him to do that since the slap, over a month ago. He hadn’t apologized either, although he was beside himself with complicated regret.

    “OK,” said the boy, “but I have to practice first,” and it was agreed that he’d bring his plate down with him after practicing and they would sit together, hidden behind the marble front desk while the boy ate.

    “Have you ever tasted mango?” his father asked him when he came down. It was dark outside now, and the boy said he hadn’t. “I have some left over from my lunch. It’s lovely.”

    The boy took a bite and closed his eyes. “It tastes like a pine tree,” he said, and his father was proud of him for that. It sounded like poetry to Omeer, like something a smart boy would say.

    There were people coming and going, and Omeer had to get up several times to let them in or out. He turned the little TV on for the boy to watch, with the sound turned way down, but the boy turned it off again and read his book that he had carried down under his dinner plate.

    When Omeer sat down again, the boy said, “You look different,” and smiled a little at his father. Omeer remembered with shame slapping the boy’s soft, round cheek.

    He said to the boy, “Don’t worry about me, OK? Soon you will be better than I am, and remember that I want that for you. I want you to be better than me.” He looked at his boy, at his shiny black hair, at his face turned up to Omeer. “You mustn’t feel bad when you surpass me.” The boy might not understand now, thought Omeer, but he’d remember and understand later, maybe. The boy shrugged and, folding down the page of his book, turned the TV on so that a picture sprang up. “I look different to you?” Omeer asked him.

    “Your eyes or something,” the boy said, staring at the TV screen. He turned to look at his father for a moment. “Your eyes don’t look so tired.” He turned back to the television.

    A woman in a large hat came to the door and asked to be announced to Mrs. Jacobs on the seventh floor, but Mrs. Jacobs didn’t answer Omeer’s call.

    “Jesus Christ,” the woman in the hat said, sighing deeply and staring off above Omeer’s head. “So now what am I supposed to do?”

    “I’m terribly sorry,” said Omeer, aware that he was apologizing to this woman who meant nothing to him and that he had not apologized to his son. He felt the boy watching and wondered how his boy would come, finally, to think about his father.

    “I am truly sorry,” Omeer said to the woman. He bowed a little to show how sorry he was, but still she looked angry and wasn’t turning to leave.

    She seemed like tangible evidence that his currency was continuing its devaluating slide. Omeer had failed his wife, had slapped his son, had gotten himself in debt for nothing, and now he stood apologizing to strangers. His wife only smiled at him in her sleep now, and he was not allowed to share her bed anymore.

    Mrs. Jacobs from the seventh floor came in the front door finally and calmed the woman with the hat down, leading her out into the park. He could hear the woman in the hat say, “Jesus Christ,” and he heard Mrs. Jacobs say, “It’s not his fault, Mary! God!” She rolled her eyes conspiratorially over her shoulder at Omeer, and he smiled, relieved.

    The boy pretended to be watching TV, but Omeer knew he had witnessed the small disturbance and his father’s ineffectiveness.

    “What a lucky man I am,” Omeer said, tears standing up in his eyes. This was as close as he could come to saying that he was sorry, for the slap, the debt, his position in the world, for being unloved by the boy’s mother. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and the boy allowed it to stay there a moment before shrugging it off.

    The piano music continued into the fall. The woman with the purses wrapped in Saran Wrap continued to come every Tuesday, and Omeer wondered where she would go for the winter. Who would understand that, although once her shoes had been on the wrong foot, she deserved a place to sit on a Tuesday afternoon to feel like she was not alone?

    His Samoan came only once in September and she was with a friend, a co-worker maybe. Omeer was so happy to see her that he jumped up without thinking and tipped his little folding chair over. He righted it and fled the park, his face warm, tremendously glad to have seen her.

    He saw her for the last time in October when she showed up for the final piano performance of the year. She had on a long sweater that came below her knees over her tangerine-colored Spandex outfit. She was pushing a wheelchair with an old man in it. The man was unmoving and listing sharply to one side. The Samoan’s robustness and polish made the man in the wheelchair look chalky and frail like a dried white leaf.

    She sat down in a chair just a few tables over from Omeer, and he could hear her talking softly to the man. She took care of him, Omeer realized. This was her job. The pianist came out, a jacket on against the chilly October afternoon. It was a Tuesday, Omeer knew, because the Saran Wrap lady was there, placing her purses on chairs like she was having a tea party and each purse was a guest. His Samoan pulled a sleeve of Oreos from her purse and put one in the old man’s hand, pushing his fingers together so he wouldn’t drop it. She whispered loudly in his ear, “It’s a cookie. You can eat it.”

    She stood up behind him and patted down his hair with her colossal hand very gently, smiling down on him. The music started. It was classical, gorgeous, complicated music. It felt like a party. For a moment Omeer enjoyed his place in the park and forgot his debt, the way he embarrassed his son, his wife’s dismissiveness, the board president’s complaints. He felt these people in the park, the man pushing the garbage can and catching every fallen leaf, the woman with the wrapped purses, these were his friends too or, if not his friends exactly, well, they shared something.

    His Samoan was tapping on the old man’s shoulder, swaying to the music. Omeer could see her enormous rounded calves like half-melons beneath her long sweater. He could see his building just beyond her, and a wedding party emerging from the hotel next door to it. They served coffee there for $9 a cup. He had asked the hotel’s doorman. Nine dollars a cup. Imagine that, and people paid it.

    The two men who had cleaned out the coins from the fountain earlier were there, whispering to each other, their heads close together, laughing, leaning on their brooms. The wind was in the piano player’s hair and made his smile look like it hung under a white cloud. There was a mother with her child asleep in its stroller, completely limp, while the mother texted on her phone to someone who was far away.

    Omeer thought of those people in the paper who had lowered the park decades before. They had been visionaries. They had. As everything fell away, his savings, his marriage, his hair, Omeer knew he was still tremendously lucky. Lowering the park had, despite reason and cost and common sense, made the park into a palace, Omeer’s palace. Here he sat amidst the swirling leaves, knowing that he would be back in spring, right here to listen to the music with his companions, the park like a cradle, rocking them all together. Incredible. SEP Logo Reverse

     

    Sideshow

    Saturday Evening Post Cover from May 3, 1947
    Circus Artist
    Norman Rockwell
    May 3, 1947

    Brown-tipped leaves hung between leaves clinging to their last shades of yellow and the sky was gray and flat, and the air metallic. Luc watched a squirrel flick its tail at the rust while his cereal sat untouched on the table behind him. He’d already dressed himself and for a second I missed the days when I could help him with that. His shirt was buttoned to the collar.

    All summer, he’d begged me to take him to Coney Island. Now fall was almost over and still we hadn’t gone and I could tell he’d begun the slow process of letting hope go and turning against me. He was just like his mother in that way, holding so many small things against me.

    “Change your clothes,” I said. “I’m not taking you to school.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because we’re going somewhere else.”

    He turned back to the squirrel and it leapt away, landing on the nearest tree and running vertically down the trunk, leaves shaking in its wake. Luc wanted me to beg, but he wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

    “You heard what I said, didn’t you?”

    He nodded.

    “Then don’t pretend like you didn’t.”

    I watched him walk in sock feet down the hallway to change out of his uniform. Neither of us liked mornings. I think he learned from me how sensitive to be. Lately I’d noticed him smelling my coffee, which meant he was getting a taste for it, which was bad because he was already small for a 10-year-old.

    Caffeine would stunt his growth and keep him from playing sports in middle school. Then again, maybe he wasn’t that kind of kid. I’d been made fun of when I was his age. Back then everyone just chalked it up to being boys.

    I moved our bowls to the sink and rinsed them, holding my hands under the water to warm my fingers. Then I called the office and told them I was sick, and asked my coworker if he would process my orders this once, but I could tell he was busy. A wave of guilt rose in my chest and I decided to fill the smaller Thermos for Luc just for today. A little bit wouldn’t hurt him and he was old enough to practice moderation.

     

    We packed sandwiches and took the scenic route down Beverley past the historic houses and the row of Hasidic houses where the little boy was murdered the year before. He was only eight and his body had been chopped into bits after a family friend went berserk, later claiming in court that inbreeding in the Hasidic community was to blame for his insanity. The boy’s feet were found in a freezer.

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    Luc carried the Thermos by its handle and every hundred feet or so stopped to drink from it and let the steam warm his face. People passed us on the way to the train and I could tell Luc was feeling proud to be the only one of his friends not on his way to school that morning. After his fourth time stopping, I told him to drink slowly.

    “If you drink fast, it’ll make you nervous.”

    “I know.”

    “Your mother liked coffee,” I said.

    In the evenings, I’d walk around our apartment finding half-full cups with cigarette butts floating in them, which she’d forgotten during the day while she was writing, and she wrote everywhere. I’d leave them by the sink and wait for her to wash them herself, but after a few days they’d still be there, and I’d finally do them without saying anything about it, thinking erroneously that she had avoided doing them while knowing I couldn’t stand it, possibly to enrage me. It was one of the things we fought about in the end.

    Our fights were circuitous and fruitless. I accused her of being avoidant and she accused me of being passive aggressive. I accused her of immaturity and she accused me of always trying to control her. I accused her of inconsideration and she accused me of manipulation and secrecy. Now it all seemed so stupid: just a lot of wasted words and wasted time.

    “Last time we went to Coney Island, remember how the Wonder Wheel stopped at the top because that girl was sick?”

    “That was scary, wasn’t it?”

    He nodded.

    We passed a cluster of Bangladeshi men conferring outside the fresh market and rounded the corner to the F train, descending a flight of concrete stairs covered in pigeon droppings and cooked rice, and receipts floating on the warm, rising air. In the station, Luc waited by the turnstiles while I refilled our MetroCards, and we continued on to the platform and stood near the benches. All the seats were taken.

    We watched an older man stand and walk a few feet down the platform. A woman in heels took his place with her purse on her lap, scrolling through her iPhone. Her hair was tied at the back in a simple knot, from which some locks had come loose, and she wore a thin, gold band on her finger, but otherwise no jewelry. Her eyes were small and tired, staring down at the screen.

    “Do you like any girls right now?” I asked.

    “Not really.”

    “Any guys?”

    He looked at me. “No way.”

    I looked back at him sideways and laughed. Luc didn’t think it was funny.

    “Just asking.”

    “I’m not like that.”

    “I wouldn’t care if you were.”

    He leaned forward to look down the tracks and I pulled on his hood to keep him from falling. A breeze floated into the station lifting a few strands of the woman’s hair from her suit jacket. All of us approached the doors as the train slowed to a stop, and we stepped into the cold, white light. Luc and I took a bench at the back of the last car. He stood to watch the tracks rush away behind us as we pulled south, entering the dark of the tunnel.

     

    Even before Luc was born, we read to him every night. We stocked a bare-wood shelf with the books our parents read to us when we were little, and others we picked up at the bookstore around the corner. Quiet titles like Where the Wild Things Are and The Velveteen Rabbit were our favorites, including Luc’s. Even when he was too young to understand the stories, he’d lie down to listen to us read and play with his feet, always falling asleep before we got to the end.

    There was something about The Velveteen Rabbit that got me every time: how loving a thing makes it real. But it doesn’t just stop with love, because when the rabbit becomes real, then it has to go away. The boy sees him again in the woods, at the end, and they look at each other before the rabbit disappears again. The boy’s life goes on as if the rabbit were never there.

    And there is the fact that the rabbit has a body that can die, which he never had before. Only then can he be real.

    On the train, Luc leaned against my shoulder, reading a horror novel.

    “Is that scary?”

    He nodded.

    “What’s it about?”

    He shrugged.

    “You don’t know?”

    “No, I know.”

    Once, I caught him packing a book in his lunchbox, and when I asked him if he was really going to read it, he said, “I don’t know. I just want to have it with me.”

    “Do you remember your mother’s favorite book?”

    He shook his head.

    “Me, either. If I thought really hard, I could remember.”

    Luc closed his book in frustration and held it on his lap, glaring at the opposite wall.

    “I’m sorry, you’re trying to read,” I said.

    “It’s not that.”

    “Then what?”

    He stood and walked to the opposite benches, where two women in hijab leaned in opposite directions to let him look at the map. He placed his finger on a dot and traced it south to the water, wobbling as he turned around again and the train came to a stop. Then he sat back down next to me and looked straight ahead, as before.

    “What did I say?”

    “Nothing. You just talk about her a lot.”

     

    I proposed to Luc’s mother on the Wonder Wheel when she was already Luc’s mother. She said no and we continued to ride in silence, the ground rising and falling beneath us, the car rocking back and forth in the air. Afterward, I went home alone. She called me that night to see if I wanted to talk about what happened, but I didn’t think there was anything more to say. She knew how I felt and I knew how she felt.

    A few months later, we were living together. Luc was teething and sick all the time, and crying. We slept very little, and made love very little. I was jealous of the attention she gave Luc, as irrational as I knew that to be. She was a good mother, but more than that, she was a good human. She never allowed herself to be consumed by the role of motherhood.

    She wrote just as often as before, but at different times of the day: early mornings, and while Luc was napping. Meanwhile, things like showering fell by the wayside. She never acknowledged my jealousy, though I knew she knew I felt it. She thought it was childish. She was right.

    All of the rides were still as we approached from down the street, past our favorite pizza parlor, and the sky overcast as if it would rain, which meant that soon it would snow. Luc pulled my hand back in the direction of the pizza and we ordered two slices then continued on our way toward the water, eating them as we walked.

    “I forgot they shut the rides down after Halloween,” I said. “I guess we’ll just play the games. I’m sorry.”

    Luc didn’t respond.

    “Are you disappointed?”

    “No.”

    “We can go to the freak show.”

    “Sure, OK.”

    He finished his pizza and threw the greasy plate in a trashcan as we crossed the road, entered the amusement park, and walked between the stalls. Cold air blew off the beach and the smell of salt mingled with that of hot dogs and axel grease, and fresh trash bags. The pathways were mostly empty save for a few older couples and families of tourists braving the cold, wet, late season.

    From a distance, we heard a fuzzy recording of a bugle and a demented laugh, and made our way toward it. We found the building brightly painted in traditional circus posters and banana-yellow background, with loudspeakers shouting about the sideshow. A neon sign advertised “Freaks” and “Strange People.” I paid $15 and we took our seats before a low, red stage in an otherwise empty theater. Luc brought his knees up to his chest and rested his feet on the chair.

    “You’re going to make it dirty,” I said.

    He put his feet down. We waited.

    People filed in and a few minutes later, a man in a black-and-white striped shirt took the stage. He carried a doll the size of his torso in one hand and a music stand decorated with gold fringe in the other. He placed the stand in the middle of the stage, rested the doll on it, and spoke into the microphone.

    “Hello everyone, and welcome to the Coney Island sideshow. I’d like to introduce you to my friend Homer.”

    “Homo, you idiot,” said the doll. People laughed.

    “What?”

    “Not Homer; Homo. My name is Homo. And you’re Limp!”

    Luc laughed and brought his knees up again, resting his feet on the chair. I didn’t say anything.

    “I’m Larry,” said the man in the striped shirt. “Not Limp.”

    “That’s not what your wife told me,” said Homo. Uproarious laughter from the crowd. Luc looked at me. I smiled. He smiled and looked back at the stage.

    “Homo, what’s this thing you’re wearing on your head?”

    “It’s an Indian headdress. I’m Iroqueer.”

    “Don’t you mean Iroqouis?”

    “No, Iroqueer! I’m a gay Indian!” Laughs.

    “And your sister?”

    “Oh, she’s from New Mexico, she’s a Na-va-HOE.”

    Luc laughed the loudest. I groaned and leaned back in my chair, covering my eyes. I glanced back at the door. A man stood in front of it with his arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe. He smirked at the stage. Luc noticed me looking.

    “No, I want to stay,” he said.

    “I think this might be too mature for you,” I said.

    “No, it’s not! I can handle it!” he said. I motioned for him to lower his voice.

    “I can handle it,” he said.

    “Fine, but we’re talking afterward.”

    He put his feet on the ground and sat up straight, to show me how adult he was.

    “Homo, tell the audience about your childhood,” said Larry.

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    “My father carved me out of the hardest piece of oak in the forest,” he said. “Then he abandoned me. He was made of ASS-pen.”

     

    We played some games afterward and Luc won a goldfish, which he promised to take care of. We bought ice cream and went to the boardwalk to eat it, and sat on a bench looking out at the gray water. Deep in the distance the horizon was blurred, and sea and sky churned together in the low-slung clouds. The air smelled ionic.

    A woman jogged past us followed by a golden retriever on a leash tied to the woman’s waist. She kept her hair back with a headband that wrapped around her skull in a tight circle. Her leggings were the brown of the boardwalk with a silver stripe running from ankle to hip. I watched her until she disappeared into a cluster of people, then I couldn’t find her again.

    “Remember The Velveteen Rabbit?” Luc said.

    “Of course.”

    “What happened to it?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “It’s not on my bookshelf.”

    “You want to read it?”

    “Yes.”

    “You haven’t read that book for years.”

    He got up and walked down the boardwalk and found a trashcan, then stopped and looked at me, holding the cone out over it. I nodded and he dropped it inside, apparently finished.

    For a long time, we sat staring out at the water.

    “Can I tell you something?” he said.

    “Of course.”

    “You promise you won’t be mad?”

    “I promise.”

    “I know you’re not my father.”

    An artificial melody played in the distance, carried by wind. We were quiet for a long time.

    “It’s OK,” he said. “I still feel like you are.”

    “I’m glad. You know I love you.”

    “I love you, too.”

    “You are my son, though.”

    “I know.”

    I reached into my jacket and handed him one of the sandwiches we’d packed that morning, and opened the other for myself. Down on the beach, a couple walked along the line of the water, looking for shells in the sand. SEP Logo Reverse

     

    Nothing but the Truth

    Medic Treating Injured in Field by Mead Schaeffer March 11, 1944
    Medic Treating Injured in Field
    by Mead Schaeffer
    March 11, 1944

    My Uncle Lyle Sims came home from World War II in the spring of 1946, six months after the war was over. He had been badly wounded early in ’45 when the Allies rolled into Germany, and healing his physical wounds took a year in Walter Reed Hospital. His other wounds, the wounds to his soul, did not heal. They remained open.

    Aunt Kate and I went to meet his train at Union Station in Memphis. I was 8 then, and I’d been living with her for only a few months, so what little I knew of my uncle came from photographs in her old family album. She showed me pictures of Uncle Lyle and her at their wedding, and he looked like a tough, wiry, and very happy farm boy. She also showed me shots of my parents at their wedding, and for a long time I could not look at them without crying. Both had died within two years of each other—my dad was shot down over the Pacific in 1943, and Mama had died in late ’45 of flu that turned to pneumonia. I became a sad, sickly boy living with my ailing grandmother, and if Aunt Kate hadn’t traveled all the way to Kentucky to take me to their farm near the town of Ethan, Mississippi, I would have ended up in an orphanage.

    Instead I was standing there beside her in the Memphis station as we watched Uncle Lyle step down onto the platform. He was carrying his duffle bag and wearing an oversized uniform, and for a moment he stood looking lost and confused until Aunt Kate cried, “Lyle, oh, Lyle!” and ran to him, nearly knocking him down when she grabbed him. For a long time they held each other, not saying a word, while I stood back, wondering how he would react to the strange kid in his house. Finally he lifted his head from Aunt Kate’s shoulder, nodded at me and said, “So you’re Curtis Spence. I hear you’re a big help to my girl here, and I want to thank you.” He patted me on the back and turned again to Aunt Kate. “How do we get home, honey?”

    “I’ve got bus tickets,” she answered. “The depot’s down the street.”

    My uncle lived for only eight years after he came home, and I never really got to know him man to man. But when we walked out of the train station together, I remember feeling that I was part of an actual family again.

     

    For several years our life together was good. As I grew older I had chores to do after school, and whenever I could I helped Uncle Lyle with the heavy work, plowing the garden, splitting firewood, cutting hay, repairing pasture fences, so that by age 13 I had become a stringy, 6-foot rail of bone and muscle. My uncle and I worked well together, but during his last years he began to have the haunted look of a man who had experienced something terrible, and I came to the realization that, bit by bit, he was turning much of the work over to me. He would observe my comings and goings from an old wooden rocker on the porch, sometimes nodding at me in approval, but whenever I saw a certain vacant expression on his face and a look of pain in his eyes, I felt that he was slipping away from us.

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    We had entered the 1950s, and the Korean War produced a minor economic boom. Even small towns were offering work in newly built shoe and shirt factories, and you could almost take your pick of jobs in Memphis. Uncle Lyle and Aunt Kate, though, never thought of moving off the land. He had a small pension from the government, and the farm produced eggs, milk, and meat. Aunt Kate home-canned fruit and vegetables, sold eggs to the Liberty Cash grocery, and with help from neighbor Carrie Polk, who was custodian of the only telephone in our end of the county, made marvelous strawberry and blackberry jams. For my part I tinkered so much with Uncle Lyle’s old pickup that I became a fair-to-middling shade-tree mechanic, and I began doing oil changes and tune-ups on Saturdays at Sam Johnson’s service station. Sam paid me $7 for a 10-hour day, and I always had spending money.

    Aunt Kate and I did all we could to make it easier for Uncle Lyle. But his health continued to fail, and by 1952, when I was 15, he began waking up in the middle of the night yelling. It took both of us to hold him in bed until he calmed down and lay back on his pillow. “The war,” Aunt Kate told me, “gave him terrible nightmares.”

    She was losing hope for him. Now and then, while he slept, she would open a cabinet drawer and remove a battered notebook and a sheaf of documents. In the notebook she kept records of their income and expenses. The documents—tax receipts, the deed to the farm, burial policies, bank books, paid-up loan papers—more or less represented their net worth. There was also a life policy that Uncle Lyle had bought from Hayden Culver, the local agent for TranSouth Insurance. I watched Aunt Kate as she studied the items, adding up columns of figures in the notebook. The total never seemed to please her.

    During Uncle Lyle’s last year he began taking walks alone to the pasture down behind the barn. There was a big oak stump near the stock pond where he sat watching the dusk come, and in the late afternoon coolness Aunt Kate and I usually sat together on the porch waiting for him. One evening she said to me, “Curtis, I want to show you something.” She nodded in Uncle Lyle’s direction. “Maybe it’ll help you to understand him.”

    She went into the house, returning with a worn envelope. She pulled out a creased and fragile sheet of paper and handed it to me carefully.

    “I wrote him a letter every day,” she said. “He answered whenever he could, but this is the letter he wrote me after he first got to the hospital. I’d like you to read it.”

    The handwriting was shaky, but readable:

    Honey …

    I want to tell you what happened to me. The drs. say it’s okay if I want to do it, and it might help me and them. Most of it they know, but I want you to know, too.

    Remember I wrote from Camp Shelby about my friends Ken and Donnie; also a fellow named Tom Fowler. We went thru basic training together and then overseas and to the front. We were on a machine gun when the Germans shelled us. It was pure hell. We got blown all to pieces. I couldn’t believe I was still alive. I was half-buried and couldn’t see. When I could see again, Tom had no head, and Donnie’s legs were gone. He died while I watched him. Ken was screaming at me but I couldn’t help him and he died, too.

    Finally I dug out and started walking. I had shrapnel in my back and hip, but I don’t feel it because all I could think of was my friends dead. I walked toward the German lines, hoping they would shoot and I would be dead, too. But the Germans were gone, and troops were minesweeping the road and saw me and took me to the aid station. I’m still alive, but I can’t forget what I saw on that day no matter how much I try. It would be better if I was dead so you could collect my insurance, because I won’t be much good for you or anything else now. The doctors let me write this, but I don’t think it will help.

    He signed it, “Your husband, Lyle.”

    Aunt Kate watched me as I read. When I finished, I knew the letter told of something truly horrible, yet I could not imagine it. In my world people weren’t blown to pieces. The Korean War newsreels showed only columns of soldiers and distant clouds of smoke, or tanks making dust on the roads, or sometimes long lines of refugees. The soldiers who rode by in the troop trucks waved and smiled at the camera.

    I handed the letter back and she slipped it carefully into its envelope. For a while we listened to the cicadas in the oak trees, and finally I said. “I wish that hadn’t happened to him.”

    “So do I,” she said. “I wrote him back lots of letters. Told him I loved him and to trust the Lord, mind the doctors and get well. But I guess it didn’t help. His other letters were just notes that never said much. Just that he was doing okay.”

    I tried to sound hopeful. “He’ll get better someday.”

    “Maybe,” she answered. She sighed and looked intently at me. “But I’ll tell you, Curtis; I think sometimes a man can get a wound so bad it kills him, yet he keeps waking up every morning. I think it’s like that for him.”

    Just then we saw Uncle Lyle closing the pasture gate, and as he walked toward us Aunt Kate said, “Maybe he’ll eat something tonight.” She pushed herself up from the rocker and went into the house.

    For a long time that night, I lay thinking about the letter, and what Aunt Kate had said about Uncle Lyle living with his wound. He had been living with it for years now; but if she was right, it wouldn’t be long before that terrible dream would come for one last time, and he would not wake up again.

    But it didn’t happen that way.

    On a cloudy afternoon in September my uncle kissed his wife, waved to me, and walked out the back door. As usual he was wearing his old shooting coat, and Aunt Kate and I figured he was heading to the tree stump by the pond. Thanks to Mr. Slade Walker’s bull, we’d had two new calves that spring, and Uncle Lyle liked watching them at play in the pasture. A few days earlier I’d seen him actually smiling at them.

    At the time I had said something like, “They’re a fine pair, ain’t they?”

    Uncle Lyle had nodded. “Need to watch ’em, though, around the pond. I saw a moccasin the other day.”

    “Probably just a black water snake,” I said.

    “No,” he’d replied softly. “Moccasin.”

    Then on that last day, 10 minutes after he’d walked out the door, I heard Aunt Kate call out from the front room, “Oh, Lord, Curtis! He took the gun.”

    I found her standing before the open door of the cedar closet, a frightened look on her face. The shotgun, an old single-barrel J. C. Higgins .12-gauge, was absent from its corner. It was a dangerous worn-out relic with a hair trigger, and I had been warned from my first days with Aunt Kate never to touch it.

    “He wasn’t carrying it when he left,” I said.

    “Oh, but he’s slick,” she said. “He knew I’d stop him. I guarantee he slipped out sometime this morning and hid it.” She brought both hands to her cheeks. “Listen,” she said, “go find him. Just stay with him and talk to him. Tell him I said not to load that gun. He’ll listen.”

    “Yes, ma’am.

    But by then it was too late. I was on the porch pulling on my boots when I heard the heavy boom of the gun. Behind me I heard Aunt Kate cry out, “Oh, my God!” and I jumped from the porch and ran for the pasture. I cleared the fence in one bound while Aunt Kate was stopped at the gate, tugging at the latch.

    I saw Uncle Lyle as I rounded the corner of the barn.

    He was sitting on the stump, bending forward and rocking slightly back and forth. The shotgun lay on the ground at his feet, and as I approached he turned his eyes toward me and shook his head as if to warn me away. Then I saw the blood.

    I said, “Hey, Uncle Lyle. What happened?”

    “It was an accident,” he said. “Gun went off.”

    I moved to his left side and saw where the pellets had struck him. His canvas shooting coat was bloody. He was holding it tight to his ribs with his hand, his blood seeping between his fingers. Then Aunt Kate came running up and knelt in front of him.

    “Oh, Lyle,” she said. “Oh, baby, what have you done?”

    He looked at her, blinking, and said, “It was an accident.”

    “Well, of course it was.” She placed her hand on his cheek. “It’ll be all right. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

    He whispered to her, the words barely audible. “I couldn’t bear it, Kate.”

    “It’s okay, baby,” she answered quietly. “We’ll fix it.”

    “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

    “Sit still now. We’ll talk about it later.” They were talking in a hushed way, as they did in bed on some nights, but I heard every word. She looked up at me and said calmly, “Get over to Carrie Polk’s. Tell her your uncle’s had an accident and we need the ambulance quick!”

    “Yes’m,” I said.

    I figured cutting across the pasture would be faster than going for the truck, which might not start anyway, so I ran as hard as I could. But it seemed a very long time before I reached Mrs. Polk’s, and it was even longer before the ambulance came, and by the time medics reached him, Uncle Lyle was unconscious. They carried him up the hill on a stretcher while Aunt Kate jogged beside him holding an IV bottle. On the stretcher he looked as small as a child.

    She climbed into the back of the ambulance and called, “Curtis, follow us in the truck.”

    The old truck started with only one backfire, and I stayed behind them all the way to the hospital in Walnut Grove. They used the siren at first, but then, just outside of town, they turned it off, and I thought, “Uncle Lyle’s dead.” And it was true. He had lost too much blood sitting there with Aunt Kate holding him, and I think she knew he was dead even before we got to the hospital. We sat together in the hall until a doctor, a bald man in a rumpled white coat, came to us and said, “He’s gone, ma’am. I’m very sorry.”

    Aunt Kate stared straight ahead. Then she nodded. She didn’t cry then, nor did she cry when we drove back home late that night. She warmed a bowl of vegetable soup for me, ate nothing herself, and was still reading her Bible in the light of a kerosene lamp when I went to bed.

    Later, before the sun came up, I heard her cry out from her bedroom, “Oh, Lyle!” Maybe she was awake, or maybe she dreamed and called to him in her sleep. Either way I believe she felt him, maybe even saw him, and was saying goodbye to him.

     

    The summons to the Coroner’s Inquest came by registered mail several weeks after my uncle’s funeral, and I noticed Aunt Kate’s hand shaking as she signed for it.

    In essence the letter said:

    The following named individuals are required by law to appear at the Office of the Coroner, Layton County Courthouse, on November 9, 1953, to testify concerning the manner of death of Lyle David Sims. Also bring any official documents, law enforcement findings, medical reports, death certificates, etc. that are in your possession and may be pertinent to this hearing.

    It was signed: “Charlene Bailey, County Coroner”

    Aunt Kate’s name was there. So was mine.

    The hearing was two weeks away, and for Aunt Kate it was two weeks of worry. She was sure the reason for the inquest centered on the policy Uncle Lyle had bought from TranSouth Insurance. After the funeral Mr. Culver had given her an “Application for Benefits” form and helped her to fill it out, and she was worried about the policy’s terms. They stated that the company would pay a limited benefit if death occurred within three years of the inception date, but full value after three years, and for accidental death, the double indemnity clause meant that Aunt Kate would collect $10,000. But if the death were a suicide, the beneficiary would only receive the amount that had been paid in premiums.

    She said wearily, “I guess those people think he did it on purpose.”

    “He said it was an accident,” I said.

    She didn’t respond, and I added, “I heard him say it.”

    “I know,” she said softly, “But you can’t blame them. Business is business.”

    “I’ll tell ’em it wasn’t suicide.”

    She sighed. “We couldn’t prove it, though, could we?”

    She sounded really despondent, and for a moment I thought of saying that they, not us, would have to prove anything, but I didn’t. I remembered their whispered conversation that day in the pasture; my uncle’s tacit admission that his life had become more than he could bear, and the effort she had made to quiet and comfort him. I remembered Aunt Kate’s earlier words—that a man could be mortally wounded and still live—and I truly believed that if anything other than an accident had killed my uncle, it had to be the war, and to me that made him a hero, not a suicide.

     

    There were several people from Ethan at the inquest: Sam Johnson had closed his station for the morning and sat on the back row in his oil-stained jumpsuit; Mrs. Polk was there, wearing her Sunday hat, and so were others, including Mr. Culver, the insurance agent, sitting beside a blue-suited man who held a briefcase. A jury box on the far side of the room contained six jurors: three sunburned men in short-sleeved shirts, one in bib overalls, and two 50ish women in starched housedresses.

    We who had been summoned to testify sat on the front row of the small courtroom: Deputy Tom Blankenship, the officer who responded to Mrs. Polk’s emergency call; Dr. Luke Wendell, the County Medical Examiner, and then the Walnut Grove Hospital doctor who had seen Uncle Lyle at the Emergency Room. Aunt Kate sat beside him, and I beside her. As we watched the court reporter start to unpack her machine, the door behind the front desk opened and a small, bright-blonde woman emerged, smiled at everyone, and sat down in the swivel chair at the desk.

    “My name is Charlene Bailey,” she said. “I’m the county coroner, and I thank you all for being here. I promise I’ll do my best to conduct this inquest quickly so you can all get on back home and go about your business …”

    She paused, looking directly to us, the witnesses. “Now then,” she said. “Certain questions have been raised concerning the manner of death of a citizen of this county, Mr. Lyle David Sims, and it is my duty to ascertain answers to those questions. So I’m asking all of you who will be testifying to please to stand now and be sworn.”

    We stood as a group, and the assistant coroner charged all of us to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Then the first witness, the hospital doctor, sat down in the witness chair and stated his name: “R.W. Caldwell, MD.”

    Mrs. Bailey smiled and asked in her soft Southern voice, “Dr. Caldwell, you signed Mr. Sims death certificate, is that correct?”

    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. “I have a copy of it right here.”

    “May I see it, please?”

    He passed her the document which she unfolded, studied for a minute or so, and handed back. “The certificate shows the cause of death to be a shotgun wound,” she said, “and the manner of death is accidental.”

    “Yes, ma’am,” said Dr. Caldwell. “That’s based on the information I had at the time.”

    Mrs. Bailey leaned forward and asked, “Have you ever attended any other person who committed suicide or attempted suicide?”

    “Yes, ma’am. Several.”

    “Is there anything in this case that might cause you to doubt the death was accidental?”

    Dr. Caldwell frowned for a moment. “No, ma’am. Usually people who commit suicide do it with a pistol or rifle, and usually it’s a head or heart shot. Mr. Sims’ wound wasn’t necessarily fatal, and he died from shock and loss of blood. It didn’t look to be deliberate to me.”

    “In your opinion, might it have been suicide?”

    The doctor gave a half-shrug. “I guess it’s possible.”

    Mrs. Bailey seemed to mull that over, then said, “Thank you, Doctor.” As Dr. Caldwell stepped down, the coroner said, “Dr. Wendell, if you please …”

    The Medical Examiner gave testimony about the internal damage to Uncle Lyle’s body: the severe bleeding, graphic details about what the small-game pellets had done to his vital organs. Sitting next to Aunt Kate I felt her body recoil, as if the words were like whip lashes, but the doctor seemed bored by the whole process. I found myself getting angrier by the minute.

    Mrs. Bailey said to him, “I assume you examined Mr. Sims’ clothing?”

    “Yes, I did.”

    “Tell us what you concluded from your examination.”

    Dr. Wendell cleared his throat. “The shot came from very close range, penetrating the jacket he was wearing. It left gunpowder residue on the fabric, and in my opinion Mr. Sims would have died quickly if the cloth hadn’t embedded the wound and partially staunched the bleeding.”

    “I see.” The coroner looked thoughtful. “So you’re saying his death was delayed because his coat slowed the loss of blood.”

    “I think so, yes.”

    “Then do you think Mr. Sims committed suicide?”

    “He might have,” said the medical examiner. “He just didn’t do a very good job of it.”

    I took a quick look at the jury, thinking the ME’s flippant attitude might have been distasteful to them, especially the women. But they seemed to accept it.

    Mrs. Bailey looked out at the three people remaining on the front row. “You’re next, please, Deputy.” As Blankenship sat down, she said, “Now, sir, you were the investigating officer at the death scene?”

    The deputy nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I examined the weapon and took pictures,” he said. “The gun’s a .12 gauge. Very old. It had been fired that morning, and the empty shell was still in the chamber. There was also blood on the barrel and stock.”

    “Where did you find the gun?”

    “In the pasture near the pond on the Sims’s place. There was a stump that had bloodstains, too, so I’m sure that’s where the shooting happened.”

    “You took pictures, you say? May I see them, please?”

    “Yes, ma’am.” He passed her a manila envelope containing a half-dozen black and white pictures, and she studied each for a few seconds, then picked out one and handed it back to the deputy.

    “I see various things lying around the stump. Can you tell me what they are?”

    The deputy looked closely at the picture. “Well, there’s the gun, some medical packaging, and a wad of blood-stained gauze. Also Mr. Sims’s shirt and coat. The coat had three unused shotgun shells in the breast pocket. I left them in the sheriff’s evidence room, and I sent the gun and the clothing to the ME’s office.”

    “Very well. Anything else you want to add?”

    She was talking to Blankenship, but she had turned to look at me with a frown of disapproval, because as I listened to the deputy’s testimony I almost fell from my chair. It happened in a flash, a burst of enlightenment, so that when I actually realized what I’d heard I was so jolted with excitement that my chair did a little dance.

    The deputy didn’t notice. “No, ma’am,” he said. He gave a nod toward Aunt Kate and me. “I’d just like to say that Mrs. Sims and Curtis there are fine folks, and I’m sorry it happened.”

    As Deputy Blankenship stepped away from the witness chair, Mrs. Bailey looked directly at me. “Now—Master Curtis,” she said. “Are you in disagreement with the deputy’s testimony?”

    “No, ma’am.”

    “Well, something he said seemed to light a fire under you. Do you have something to tell us?”

    I swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes’m, I do.”

    fiction_contest_call_to_action

    The witness chair was just a few steps away, but in the miniscule amount of time it took to reach it, everything came together in my mind. The Bible says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” and that I would never do. I had also sworn to tell, as the clerk said, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” and that’s what I meant to do. But until the deputy’s testimony, I hadn’t known what the truth was, but now I honestly believed it had been revealed, and I would tell the truth, the whole truth as it was made known to me in that split second, and no one could ever make me believe differently.

    I took my place in the chair, and Mrs. Bailey looked at me.

    “Let’s hear it.”

    I took a deep breath and said, “He went to shoot a snake.”

    In obvious disbelief she said, “A snake? And where was this snake?”

    “It was in the pond.”

    “You know this for a fact?”

    “Yes, ma’am. Uncle Lyle told me about it.”

    At that point I stopped talking to her. I looked out at the spectators, and the people in the jury box, and they were all watching me intently, all eager to hear what I would say, and they empowered me. I raised my voice and started talking straight to them.

    “We had some new calves,” I said, “and Uncle Lyle was real fond of ’em. A day or so earlier he told me he’d seen a big moccasin in the pond, and it worried him ’cause the calves played around there. So that morning he did what any farmer would do. He got his gun and went after that snake. But the gun was in awful shape, old and rusty, and it was hard to thumb the hammer back. And if you weren’t careful with it, it could fire without you pulling the trigger.”

    I paused to catch my breath. “He hadn’t been well since the war, and maybe he didn’t set the hammer right. He might’ve stumbled or dropped the gun, but somehow it fired and hit him in the side. And I know he didn’t do it on purpose. We only had four shells for that gun—in a box in the closet. The deputy said he found three shells in his coat pocket, which means Uncle Lyle took all the shells we had.” I turned to the coroner. “He wouldn’t have taken all of ’em unless he thought he might need more than one shot. And he might if he was shooting at a snake.” I looked at the people in the courtroom. “If he really meant to kill himself, he would only need to take one shell.”

    For a moment everyone, including the coroner, seemed to ponder the logic of that, and then she looked toward the jury box. A stirring was growing among the spectators, and the jurors whispered to each other. Mrs. Bailey lifted a small gavel and tapped gently.

    “Let’s be orderly, please.” She turned again to address the jury. “Would you folks like to hear from Mrs. Sims now?”

    The jurors looked at each other, and the man in overalls, taking his cue from the others, stood up. “It ain’t necessary, ma’am.”

    “I see,” said the coroner. “Are you the foreman of the jury?”

    The man looked back at his fellow jurors, who were nodding. “I reckon I am, ma’am.”

    “Then would you like to retire and consider the testimony?”

    The foreman remained standing, turning to look, one by one, at the other jurors, each of whom in their turn whispered something to him.

    He cleared his throat. “We already decided, ma’am. We find the death of Lyle David Sims to be accidental.”

     

    As Aunt Kate and I walked down the courthouse steps, a voice called, “Mrs. Sims. Just a moment, please.”

    It was the well-dressed man who had been at the inquest with Culver. He said, “I’m Hector Bennett, an attorney for TranSouth. Mr. Culver will bring your check tomorrow morning if that suits you.” He held out his hand. “Congratulations.”

    For a moment Aunt Kate swayed as if she might faint, but she caught my arm, steadied herself and shook the attorney’s hand. She whispered, “Thank you, Mr. Bennett.”

    “And congratulations to you, Curtis,” he said. “That snake story beats all. It won the day.” He studied me for a moment, then turned again to Aunt Kate. “Ten thousand’s a lot of money, Mrs. Sims. What will you do with it?”

    “Save it,” she said, looking at me. “I want Curtis to go to college.”

    “Well,” he said, “there’s a break for you, young man. Have you thought where you’d like to go?”

    Never before had anybody asked about my future, and I hadn’t actually thought about it. But I found, much to my own surprise, that I had an answer.

    “To law school,” I told him. “I’d like to be a defense lawyer.”

    Again Bennett looked at me, giving me a strange half-smile, as if we shared a secret about something that only he and I understood.

    “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said as he turned to go. “No, sir. Doesn’t surprise me at all.” SEP Logo Reverse

     

    Party of Two

    Norman RockwellOverheard LoversNovember 21, 1936
    Overheard Lovers
    Norman Rockwell
    November 21, 1936

    Herbert and Marilyn walked into the newest diner in town, The Brown Bag. A yellow GRAND OPENING banner hung the length of the wall behind the hostess stand and a greasy smell of overdone French fries lingered in the air. Herbert trudged to the front and put his name on the list. The hostess said it would be a few minutes. He headed back to the door and plopped down on a bench next to Marilyn.

    “Few minutes,” he said. “It’s always a few minutes. Do you have that coupon?”

    Marilyn unzipped her purse and spotted the torn piece of newspaper. On it was an illustration of a Dagwood sandwich piled high. The sandwich had cartoon eyes and thin arms and legs; it even sported basketball sneakers. None of it made Marilyn particularly hungry. What did LA people know about delis? Why were people always trying to be something they weren’t? And why was Herbert so cheap? He’d made all this money as a CPA, and here they were only going out to eat because of a coupon. “Yes,” she said. “It’s here.”

    Whenever they went out, she realized just how estranged they were. At home, there were so many distractions: She knitted and read her romance novels, and he gardened and worked on an old Moto Guzzi in the garage. They bumped into one another in the hallway and, like co-workers, were always polite.

    A waiter dropped a tray of dishes. White plates and tall glasses exploded on the black-and-white tiles. The waiter’s face flushed, but as soon as the clientele applauded, his redness evaporated.

    The door swung open and a young man and woman entered. They were holding hands and couldn’t have been more than 20. Marilyn thought the man looked so much like Major, her first boyfriend; the girl didn’t look like anyone Marilyn knew, but Marilyn found her cute with her sundress and strappy shoes. It wasn’t sundress or strappy-shoes weather, but sometimes a woman had to make it the kind of day she wanted.

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    The young man really did look like Major, though, with a few 21st century adjustments: His hair was longer and lighter, and his clothes were too big for his frame. His wallet had a chrome chain that connected from one of his belt loops to his back pocket, and he hadn’t shaved in a few days. She never saw Major unshaven. The man had the same dark eyes and subtle freckles on his cheeks. He caught Marilyn staring at him. She smiled. He did the same. Soon after, the young woman went over and put her name down on the list. When she returned to the man’s side, they shared a secret and then a kiss. A peck on the cheek transformed into a soft-lip kiss, and before Marilyn knew it, the young man and woman’s lips had opened and were pulling on each other’s. They shut their eyes and the man moved one of his hands to the woman’s neck. Herbert looked away. The couple stopped. The woman giggled and wiped her lips with the palm of her hand.

    “Didn’t know this was a damn brothel,” Herbert said under his breath.

    “Herbert! For two!” the hostess called.

    Herbert and Marilyn followed the hostess and navigated their way from table to table, even one where some of the waitstaff had assembled and were belting out “Happy Birthday” to a little girl with pigtails. Marilyn blew the girl a kiss.

    The hostess showed them to a red vinyl booth.

    “Do you have a table?” Herbert asked. “I just can’t stand booths. Always too far from the table.”

    The hostess scanned the restaurant and tucked a pencil into her bun. “No, none available right now, but I can put you back on the list and let you know when something opens up.”

    “That’s all right,” Herbert said. “I’m hungry.” He slid into the booth.

    “My grandpa hates booths, too,” the hostess said. “Enjoy.” She headed away from the table and back to her station.

    “Always someone’s grandpa these days,” Herbert said.

    “What do you expect? We’re old,” Marilyn said.

    “Kids are too honest. That’s all. Back in my day, we said what was polite, not what was true.”

    “Where are the menus?”

    “Doesn’t matter. We’re just getting what’s offered on the coupon.”

    “I wonder if they have sweet-potato fries. I read that they’re actually kind of good for you.”

    “Where the hell’s the waitress?”

    The affectionate couple was shown to the booth opposite Herbert and Marilyn. They plopped onto the same side of the booth, slid to the far end, and pressed right up against each other. They overlooked the busy street. The woman tucked some hair behind her ear and kissed the man’s cheek. Marilyn noticed some lipstick on the man’s neck, a perfect circle of red. They had menus in front of them, but didn’t seem interested. They studied the traffic and passersby, and Marilyn thought she heard the young woman mutter something about a crow — something about how it was the only bird without a song.

    What if Herbert had gone to architecture school like he’d wanted when they’d first met? Marilyn wondered. Would he have been happier, and thus made her happier? What if she hadn’t gotten pregnant right away with the twins, forcing him to marry and stick it out at his father’s accounting firm? Did he blame her for all of that?

    She shifted her gaze towards the young man. How she missed Major. He was her first love. They had both grown up on the same street in Montpelier, Vermont. They had gone to the same grammar school, middle school, and high school. Always close and friendly, they became closer one night. It happened a week or so into their 10th-grade summer vacation. Major’s family had thrown a party for his older brother who’d recently graduated college. Marilyn had been happy as she danced in a dress that, she thought, looked similar to the young woman’s. She had been a bit tipsy with champagne and had spotted Major outside in a field of tall grass. It had been late, but still light out. Major had walked towards her and asked if she wanted to go for a stroll, head down to the Winooski River for a bit.

    “Unreal,” Herbert said. “No water. No waitress. Tell you one thing — they keep this up, they won’t be busy for long.”

    “They just haven’t got the kinks worked out yet.”

    “Sometimes things never get the kinks worked out.”

    Marilyn nodded, pulled a napkin from the dispenser, and spread it across her lap. Again, she glanced towards the couple. Her mind turned to Major. Down at the river, the two of them had dipped their feet into the Winooski, skipped stones, found stray branches, tossed them into the current and wondered where they’d end up. He’d kissed her — her first kiss and she’d let herself go. She hadn’t been sure how to kiss and had practiced on her bathroom mirror, but the real thing was different. She had left her lips parted and had let him do the work. Soft sounds had escaped her mouth, and she remembered the warmth of his touch.

    “Where’s the waitress?” Herbert asked the hostess as she rushed by.

    “No one came by yet?” she said.

    “Nope.”

    “Oh, wow. Opening weekend, you know?” She hurried off.

    “What’s with the ‘opening weekend’ stuff?” Herbert said. “It’s a good thing these people don’t make cars. Can you imagine? Oh, yes, the brakes didn’t work. Sorry, sir. Brand new car — you know how it is?”

    A laugh fluttered from the young couple’s table. They kissed again. Marilyn watched the man put his hand on the nape of the woman’s neck. She studied the way the woman’s chandelier earrings swayed.

    The waitress showed up and apologized. She was short with long bangs and puffy cheeks. “Everyone’s got tons of coupons, and I didn’t think this was my section. Crazy, right?”

    “I’ve heard crazier,” Herbert said.

    Marilyn pulled out the coupon and slid it across the table.

    “To drink?” the waitress asked.

    “A water for me,” Herbert said.

    “And I’ll take a vanilla shake.”

    “You got it. Thank you,” the waitress said. She spun around and took the young couple’s order. They no longer kissed. They ordered something called the King and Queen Platter. The man looked exactly like Major when he laughed — the way he snapped his head back and then covered his mouth with his right hand, as if he never wanted to chuckle in the first place. After that night, she and Major had gone steady. Two years later, he was drafted for Vietnam. The night before he deployed, she’d met up with him at the Winooski, only a stone’s throw from where they’d first kissed. “I’ll be back soon. We’ll meet here again. I promise,” he’d said. Marilyn had cried, then said, “I wish your parents hadn’t named you Major. You can’t expect not to be drafted with a name like that.”

    “They’re back at it,” Herbert said. “Will you look at these two kids… just kissing and kissing.”

    “It’s … isn’t it just — ”

    “Exactly. It’s just gross.”

    Marilyn took a deep breath. On October 12, 1972, Marilyn had driven with her family and Major’s family to pick him up from the Burlington Airport. He’d strutted across the tarmac in a dark-green suit with gold buttons. He’d lost some weight and his skin was tanned. He’d hugged her hard, till her back was sore. After a few hours together, Marilyn had headed off to work. “Tonight?” he’d asked. “Ten o’clock at the Winooski?”

    Marilyn and Herbert’s best day together had to be their wedding: big-band music, tiered cake, and a tossed bouquet. Since that time, it was like someone had taken a quarter from their savings account each day. It was hard to notice the loss at first, but now, only a few wrinkled bills remained. She was glad her children had moved away, hadn’t settled, and had searched for more.

    “Miss!” Herbert called. “Miss!” The hostess scurried over. Herbert leaned her way. “Would you tell that couple to quit kissing. It’s just not appropriate.”

    “Herbert,” Marilyn said in a whisper.

    The hostess craned her neck. The couple’s bodies were intertwined: her hands in his hair, his fingers on her collar bone, their lips wrapped around one another’s. Marilyn took in the other guests of the restaurant. None of them seem to notice or care. Some ate; others laughed and wiped their ketchup-covered mouths.

    “I’ll get the manager,” the hostess said.

    “You can’t tell ’em?” Herbert asked.

    She headed off.

    “Can you believe this?” Herbert said.

    “Why?” Marilyn said. “What happened — ”

    “What happened is right. What happened to people, to manners, to all of it?”

    A short time later, the manager, a tall bald man with dark circles under his eyes, delivered Marilyn’s vanilla shake and Herbert’s water. “What seems to be the problem?”
    “Not seems,” Herbert said. “What is the problem?” He pointed the way of the young couple.

    “Oh. OK, sure.” The manager turned and took a few steps in their direction. He knocked on the far end of the table. The affectionate couple looked up. Their faces were rosy and their eyes large. “Please,” he said. “It’s makin’ people uncomfortable.”

    Marilyn plucked a straw from the dispenser and dropped it into her shake.

    “Uncomfortable?” the young woman said. “How? Why?”

    “Are you kidding?” the young man said. “Just pathetic.”

    The manager’s heavy footsteps softened as he headed away from the table. Herbert popped a baby aspirin in his mouth and downed it with a slug of water. Marilyn positioned her lips around the straw and drew in some vanilla milkshake. The cold was soothing.

    For the sake of her children, and not wanting to be like her mother, Marilyn was demure, sweet, and always let Herbert get his way. She blamed herself, thinking that it could have been different if she’d just confronted him from time to time.

    Laugher from the young couple wafted her way, and she thought of Major. Just as promised, he’d showed up that night at 10 at their usual spot on the Winooski, not far from the bridge. Even though it was October, the weather had still been tinged with summer. They’d kissed and talked, but mostly held one another. “I’m going for a swim,” Major had said. “Haven’t been in this sweet river in too long. When I get out, I need to ask you something.” He’d darted over to the bridge and stripped down to his boxers, then had brought his hands together above his head, bent his knees, and sprung forward.

    Out of her periphery, Marilyn glanced the couple’s way. They were playing a sort of game. She listened closely, straining her ears. “The sixth man to walk through the door,” the young woman said. “That’s what you’re going to look like in 50 years. Wait for it, wait for it. Three and there’s four. And there’s… there’s! That’s five. Come on six! Lucky six!” They laughed. “The door stopped… what the… no, wait… here it comes!”

    She giggled and the young man slapped the table.

    “That’s not even a man!” he said, laughing. “She’s like 12.”

    “Can’t fight the game,” she said.

    Marilyn drank some more shake, then blotted her mouth with her napkin. She wondered about the young couple: where they’d met, how they’d met, if it was love at first sight, or if one of them really had to work for it. She always loved a good love story: Romeo and Juliet, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere, even Paris and Helen.

    Smoky meat permeated the room. The din of the diner was now deafening with the clamor of plates and flatware, laughter and conversation. A car in the parking lot revved its engine.

    “Christ almighty,” Herbert said, throwing a glower the couple’s way.

    As Marilyn scanned the couple, the young man pulled his head back, opened his eyes, and drew in his partner. He smiled. Marilyn saw Major. She had witnessed him leap from the bridge, arc towards the water, and splash into the river. She’d clapped and smiled, her cheeks warm, and waited for him to pop back up. She’d wondered what his question would be. He hadn’t yet come to the surface and she’d called out and then yelled, screaming his name over and over, crying Major, so much and so hard that her throat burned. She’d sprinted into the water, her dress floating up around her. She’d waded out. She’d tried to find footing: “Major! Major! Major!”

    The waitress swung by with a tray perched on her shoulder. She set it down on the edge of the table and placed a Reuben in front of both Marilyn and Herbert. “Can I get you guys anything else?”

    “Tell those two to get a room,” Herbert said.

    The waitress took a glance. “Yikes! You bet.” As she passed the young couple, she leaned forward. “Sorry, guys. Can’t do that here. This is a family place, all right?” She pressed on, weaving her way to the kitchen doors.

    Herbert took a bite and ran his tongue over his lips. Marilyn added a squirt of ketchup to her sandwich. She heard the young couple: “A family place?” the young man said. “How the hell do they think families are made?”

    The young woman laughed. “Who the hell keeps snitching?” she asked. “No one in here seems to care, except the damn waiters.”

    The young man cleared his throat. “It’s him,” Marilyn thought she heard the young man say. “The old man. I think it’s him.”

    Major diving from the bridge burned brightly in her mind. They’d found his body the next day at dawn, a few miles down the river. She’d never loved a man like she’d loved Major. He was Paris and everyone else was Cleveland. After him, she’d not wanted to be alone. A few months later, after she’d started at the barber college in upstate New York, she’d met Herbert. He was already frugal then, but he was tall and professional and he liked her. She knew that she’d be taken care of. She knew she’d no longer be alone. She knew they’d learn to live with one another, but never, like she and Major, for one another.

    In 50 years, Marilyn thought, would the young woman look back and wonder about this guy, or would she be with him? Would they take trips from L.A.? Would they visit the Grand Canyon or see a show or two in Vegas? Would they still sit on the same side of the booth?

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    The diner’s volume increased — a child at a nearby table began to cry, the restaurant’s phone rang, a patron dropped some change onto the tile floor, and a car alarm blasted from the parking lot.

    Marilyn swung her eyes to the right. The young couple was kissing. Their food had arrived, too, but it was just sitting there: a large platter piled with hamburgers, fries, onion rings, and two tall chocolate shakes with the leftovers in frosty metal tins, and strangely, two plastic crowns. One was fit for a king, the other a tiara. And then she remembered: the King and Queen Platter.

    She took another bite of her sandwich. The salty beef paired well with the creaminess of the shake, and she let the juices of both coat her mouth. The young couple took a break from kissing, placed the crowns on their heads, and resumed making out. This time, their kisses were wet and hard, and when the diner’s noise softened, Marilyn heard their lips smack.

    “For the love of God!” Herbert yelled in the direction of the young couple. He pounded his fists on the table, and the forks and knives jumped. “It’s enough. We’ve been polite. But it’s enough! It’s like we’re at some damn peep show.”

    The couple stopped kissing.

    “Peep show?” the young woman said, then laughed.

    Marilyn felt her hands grow warm and her lips quiver. She clenched her jaw and took her milkshake in her hands. Her stomach turned. She took a breath and felt Major’s hands dig into her shoulder blades on the tarmac. She pictured the two of them on the riverbank, laughing, the flash of lightening bugs all around them.

    The young man stared at Herbert. Marilyn swallowed. Her gulp felt so large that she believed everyone in the restaurant had seen it.

    “What’s your problem?” the young man asked. His voice was sharp. He wasn’t afraid of Herbert. “We’re two people in love. We’re kissing. I haven’t seen her in a while, and now I’m back and I want to kiss my girlfriend.”

    “This is not the place. This is a restaurant.” Herbert took a sip of water.

    Little by little, a hush took hold of the place, and the attention of the diner turned the way of Herbert and the young couple. The crying baby didn’t stop and neither did the phone or the commotion in the kitchen, but casual conversations were muted, laugher paused, and bodies tense. Even though Marilyn couldn’t see all the people around her, she felt their eyes, their stares, and their focused burn.

    “Haven’t you ever been in love?” the young man asked.

    “Of course,” Herbert said. “That’s not the point.”

    “That is the point,” the man said. “You’re a tired old man. There’s nothing weird about two people who love each other kissing. It’s about as interesting as a thirsty man drinking.”

    “It’s not something that’s done in public,” Herbert said.

    “Or, in your case, in private,” the young woman added. “Look at her.” Marilyn noticed the young woman point a finger her way. “Does she look happy? When was the last time you kissed her?”

    The manager hurried over. He stood between the two tables. He extended his arms in both directions. “Please, please. I need to ask you all to lower your voices. Either finish your meals quietly or leave.”

    The young man adjusted his crown, pulled a kosher dill from his plate, and gnawed off a hunk. “We’re not going anywhere,” the young man said.

    “No service until it’s too late! How many times did I ask you all to handle this situation? And what did you do?” Herbert’s voice quivered and he bit the inside of his cheek.

    “Situation?” the young woman said.

    “I’m leaving. Let’s go, Marilyn,” Herbert said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” He slid to the edge of the booth and used the table to yank himself up.

    Marilyn reached for her purse and began to scoot towards the aisle way. Then she

    stopped. Her legs were weak and her body hot. She could feel the patrons inspecting her every move. She couldn’t budge. She didn’t think she could even make it to the front door. “No,” she said.

    “Marilyn, come on,” Herbert said. He walked her way as if to help her from the booth.

    She pivoted her head and took in the clientele. They were fixated on her. Some chewed; others held fries and onion rings but were too captivated to put them in their mouths. “No,” she said again. “I want to finish my sandwich. I want to stay here.”

    Again, Herbert reached for her arm, but she scooted back into the booth and picked up her Reuben. Herbert stormed away from the table and towards the front door, and she watched it swing open and fall back flush with the wall. She stared at him for as long as she could through one of the diner’s windows, until his body was just a blotch in the parking lot.

    With each bite, the racket grew, and when Marilyn was done with most of her sandwich, she peered the couple’s way. They weren’t kissing as before, but the woman had nestled her head alongside her man’s.

    Marilyn took a slurp of her shake. The young man noticed her and smiled Marilyn’s way, and she felt a grin form on her face. She loved the way his plastic crown sparkled in the afternoon sun. She kept stealing glances while taking bites, and every so often, she would close her eyes and hear the rush of the Winooski. SEP Logo Reverse

     

    1939 Plymouth, or
    The Bootlegger’s Driver

    Chrysler-590

    Lüdvik shielded his right eye with his right hand. His elbow rested on the table.

    The sun had found a spot through the window and into the corner of his vision. He was focused on a full-page advertisement that had caught his attention: “New Free Book – How to Speak and Write Masterly English in 15 Minutes a Day.” He wrote down the address on a small square of paper.

    A cloud drifted in front of the sun, and he relaxed his hand back onto the table, stopping to look at his fingernails, which were immaculate. He adjusted the green reading lamp and unfolded the paper to its full span.

    It was his habit, every Sunday, his one day off from tinkering with watches in his cage at Gimbels, to come to the New York City Public Library and read The New York Times. Reading the newspaper like this made him feel like a rich man who could afford not only the price of a newspaper, but the time to read the entire thing, front to back. Normally, he’d steal a few words while riding the subway, and then it was mostly upside down.

    He began with the front page, left-hand article: “City Greets 1939 with Joyous Din; Vast Crowds Out.”

    Lüdvik could still feel a slight throbbing in his feet from last night’s dancing. After Lüdvik’s cajoling and threatening to leave his brother behind in their dingy apartment in the Bronx, Lüdvik and Izak had found their way into a dance hall in Times Square. Lüdvik spotted the prettiest girl and asked her to dance. He laughed as he watched his brother’s shy and pained look from the sidelines. Lüdvik and the girl jitterbugged, cha-cha’d, then took in a slow dance before the crowd yelled “Happy New Year!” and she stole a kiss. Not a bad way to end and begin his first year in New York City.

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    He pulled out the handkerchief from his pocket and unfolded it. In the center was a deep pink stain. He held the cotton square to his nose and breathed in. Cherry, roses, and licorice. In his village back home, he would have been shunned for even thinking of dancing with a non-Jewish girl.

    He loved America.

    The smell lingered in his nostrils as he caught sight of a headline next to the account of the New Year’s celebration. “Faulhaber Sermon Makes Concessions to the Nazis.”

    Lüdvik read each word very slowly.

    “Bastards,” Lüdvik spoke out loud. “Bastards.”

    “Quiet, please,” a stern voice whispered in his direction.

    Lüdvik folded the corner of his handkerchief and daubed his eyes, nodding apologetically.

    The sun poked its way from behind another cloud. Lüdvik shook his head and placed the newspaper back on the wooden rod.

    Enough bad news for one day.

    The cold air hit him even before he opened the door. Pulling his overcoat tightly around his body, he tugged on his hat and tightened his scarf. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of brown leather gloves. His manager at Gimbels had given them to him for a Christmas present. He’d never received a Christmas present before. The funny thing was that his boss was also a Jew, but he was learning that Jews in America were different, very different.

    Feeling the soft leather against his cold skin, Lüdvik worried about how to break the news that his hours at work had been cut, since business was always slow after the holidays. Izak was not going to be happy about this.

    “At least the rent is paid for January.”

    Lüdvik turned the corner just as the sun hit the windshield of a car; Lüdvik stopped and again brought his hand to his eyes.

    “She’s a beaut, huh?”

    Lüdvik looked up to see a man dressed like Tyrone Power, in a wide lapelled suit with thin white stripes. His shoulders looked as if they could stretch across the block. The man was leaning against the most beautiful car Lüdvik had ever seen.

    Sitting in the passenger seat was a woman with white blond hair. She wore a mink coat with the collar pulled up close around her neck. She was attractive in a way that felt familiar to Lüdvik.

    “Just picked it up from the show room. Right off the assembly line.”

    The car was a buttery green, with bright red leather seats that looked even softer to the touch than his gloves. The hubcaps were chrome and without a smudge. Despite the cold weather, the top was down, exposing an expansive backseat.

    “Do you mind if I ask what kind of car is it?” Lüdvik asked the man.

    “Do I mind? That’s funny! A 1939 Chrysler Plymouth. Less than 400 made. I’m Cartwright. My wife’s name is Greta. Greta, say hi to the young man. Say, what’s your name?”

    Lüdvik liked the man’s short and straightforward answers. He bet he was the kind of man who could spend as much time as he wanted reading the newspaper.

    “Lüdvik. Lüdvik Lendl.”

    “Hello, Lüdvik,” Greta said softly. She smiled and he saw that she had a gap between her two top teeth.

    Polish, thought Lüdvik. He’d recognize that accent anywhere. After four months of sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms in Danzig to earn enough money for transit to Canada, the lilt and thickness of a Polish voice was forever embedded in his brain.

    Dzień dobry. Jak się masz?

    The woman’s face lit up and she jumped out of the car. She began talking rapidly with Lüdvik, mostly one-sided, as she was so excited to be speaking to someone in her mother tongue.

    “Cartwright, Lüdvik’s from my mother’s part of the world. He’s Czech.”

    “Well, what do ya know? Small world! Greta here escaped the Nazis by the skin of her beautiful teeth. She got out right after old Adolf took over their country.”

    Lüdvik looked away uncomfortably. Greta elbowed Cartwright in the side and shook her head.

    “Sorry, he forgets that some things are just too hard to speak of.”

    Lüdvik tipped his hat toward Greta and extended his hand to Cartwright.

    “Well, Happy New Year. I hope you’re driving somewhere nice. It was good to meet you. Do widzenia.

    His stomach growled and he wondered if the automat would even be open on New Year’s Day.

    “We’re driving to California. Hollywood, California. I gotta get Greta out of the city. She hates the city, especially in the winter.”

    California? Lüdvik stopped in his tracks. He turned around and spied a large picnic basket in the backseat.

    “I’ve always wanted to go to California. I hear there are orange and lemon trees everywhere and all the women,” Lüdvik paused, suddenly too shy to continue.

    “Are as beautiful as my Greta,” Cartwright finished for him. “Yessiree, and you can smell the ocean air as far as the mountains. It’s paradise.”

    A gust of cold wind blew Lüdvik’s hat off his head. He ran a few steps to catch it and felt the cold hit his chest, through his coat, shirt, and undershirt.

    “Say, don’t know if this tickles your fancy at all, but Greta can’t drive a lick and it’s a long stretch to the West Coast for one driver. We’d cover your food and board along the way, as well as some spending dough. Whad’ya think?”

    Lüdvik thought of his brother Izak still asleep in their cold apartment. He wouldn’t be up for hours. He never ventured out on Sundays, as if he could catch up on lost sleep and store up some for the coming week. What would he think of this crazy scheme? Think? He’ll murder me, Lüdvik thought, and shook his head slightly.

    “I have a brother in the Bronx. I can’t just leave him. He’ll have my head,” Lüdvik said.

    “You can send him a telegram. What can your brother do? You’re a grown man and you’re in America now – it’s the land of opportunity! If he has any smarts, he’ll jump on the next train and join you.”

    Lüdvik took in the sight of the car for a few more seconds, memorizing its lines and curves, which struck a close resemblance to the curve of Greta’s lips.

    Cartwright walked to the driver’s door and opened it. Greta moved to the center of the front seat and patted the driver’s seat with her white-gloved hand.

    The seat was warm from the sun. Lüdvik put his hands on the steering wheel and wrapped his fingers around it. He took a deep breath in and held it in for a few seconds, as if he knew it was the last of the city’s air he’d be breathing, at least for a while.

    “What’s the fastest way out of the city?”

    Cartwright jumped in next to Greta and slammed the door shut.

    “Thatta boy, now you’re acting like a real American. We’ll take the George Washington Bridge to Jersey and then just keep heading west.”

    Lüdvik turned the ignition key. The engine turned over smoothly. Cartwright pushed a button and the top began to unroll up toward the sky.

    Lüdvik put the car in drive and gently pushed his foot down on the accelerator.

     

    Izak stirred in his sleep. The blanket had fallen off the bed and the hissing of the radiator had turned into a steady clang. He threw the thin excuse for a blanket back up over his body and kicked the radiator three times. The clanging slowed and returned to a soft hiss.

    Before he settled back to fall asleep, he lifted his head and looked at his brother’s bed. It was empty; the sheet and blanket were pulled tautly over the sagging mattress with military precision. Izak never made his bed; he figured he was just going to collapse in it at night, so why bother? But his younger brother, Lüdvik, was all about precision and timing. A walking timepiece, his brother was.

    He knew Lüdvik was at the library reading his Sunday paper. Meshugener. Why would anyone be at the library when you could be warm in your bed? He chuckled to himself and quickly fell back into a deep snore, happy in the thought that his brother would bring him back a kolach and hot coffee.

     

    The car rolled through the indiscriminate New Jersey towns, one after another. It seemed as if the entire state was asleep. No cars on the road, no people waiting for the bus or train. Lüdvik settled in behind the wheel. Occasionally, he’d glance to his right at Greta, who had fallen asleep with her head resting on Cartwright’s left shoulder.

    “Wait until we get into Pennsylvania,” Cartwright said. “Past Philly and into farmland. Then you’ll get a real sense of what makes this country so great. We’ll cable your brother from there – what did you say his name is?”

    “Izak, but his boss calls him Izzie.”

    The mention of Izak’s name made Lüdvik tighten his grip. Now that he was a few hundred miles from the city, Lüdvik felt a sense of dread.

    “Izzie, I like that. Maybe we should do the same for your name. No offense, but with the current state of things with the Krauts, you might think about changing it,” Cartwright said.

    “What about Leonard?” Cartwright suggested. “That’s pretty close to Lüdvik?”

    “I like Lüdvik,” Greta said in a sleepy voice. “It’s a very distinguished name.”

    Leonard, Lüdvik mulled in his mind. Like Leonardo da Vinci. He liked it.

    “We’ll call you Leonard for this trip and you’ll see how it fits. Or even better, Leo. If you like it, you can make it permanent,” Cartwright said. “That’s the great thing about this country. Anyone can become anything they want. A Lüdvik can become a Leo, just like that.”

    He snapped his finger in the air.

     

    “Psst, Leonard, wake up. Hey, Greta, nudge the little guy. I don’t want him to miss this sight.”

    Lüdvik had taken possession of the backseat after they’d left Missouri early that morning and had finally fallen asleep somewhere between Oklahoma and Texas. It had been a raucous night with Cartwright and his friends, one that included too much beer, something called a barbeque, and an argument with Izak, whom Lüdvik finally called.

    After they arrived and Cartwright and Greta were settled in with their friends and family, Lüdvik excused himself.

    “Lüdvik? Lüdvik? Is dat you? Oy, your brother is ready to lose his mind with worry! Have you been kidnapped?”

    “No, Mrs. Henshen,” Lüdvik responded, picturing in his mind her standing in her robe and curlers. “I’m on a business trip. Would you mind getting Izak?”

    “Izak, Lüdvik’s on the line!”

    “Did you get my telegram?” Lüdvik began, but didn’t get very far.

    “Are you out of your mind??? Yes, I got your ferkockte telegram. What kind of meshugener nonsense is this?” Izak bellowed. “Where the hell are you? Do you have any idea how sick with worry I’ve been?”

    “I’m very, very sorry, Izak,” Lüdvik said. No matter what, Izak was his older brother and the closest thing to a father figure Lüdvik had ever had.

    “It’s not like I can go to the police and ask them to look for you,” Izak shouted. “What would I tell them, that my brother who has been in the country for close to 10 years, but hasn’t bothered to become a citizen, is missing? They’d find you and ship you back to stand in line at the concentration camps with the rest of the family, you idiot.”

    Lüdvik could hear the panic in Izak’s voice, which had softened enough so that he could hear his older brother choking back tears as well.

    “Hey, buddy,” Cartwright said, coming around the corner of the hallway. “I want to introduce you to a few people. You gonna be much longer?”

    Lüdvik covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

    “I’ll join you in a few minutes,” he said.

    “OK, but don’t keep us waiting too long,” Cartwright said. “The party is just getting started!”

    “Lüdvik,” Izak shouted into the phone. “Where the hell are you?”

    Lüdvik took a big breath.

    “St. Louis,” he answered. “On my way to California. Before you start shouting at me again, let me tell you about Cartwright and Greta, and the most beautiful car you’d ever wish to see.”

    Lüdvik told Izak about the library, the cold morning, of meeting Cartwright and his beautiful Polish wife, Greta. He told him how much he hated New York City. He told his brother he didn’t come to America to be stuck in a cold, gray city with cold, gray people. They’d left all that behind in their homeland.

    “I’ll be all right, Izak,” Lüdvik said. “Cartwright has good connections and I’ll send for you in a month or two; a first-class ticket. We don’t belong in New York, at least I don’t. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

    “What about your job, Lüdvik? You have a good job and you’re just walking away like a madman?”

    Lüdvik took a deep breath. He could still feel the rattle of the pneumonia that had almost sent him back to Europe when he first landed.

    “I was going to tell you last night,” he said. “They cut my hours to less than half. Something about after Christmas, it being slow. But I paid the rent for January.”

    Lüdvik could hear his brother taking his time answering him.

    “You must be very, very careful,” Izak said slowly knowing there was nothing he could do. “Does this Cartwright character know you’re not a ‘real’ American?”

    “Don’t worry. I have to go, someone is waiting to use the phone,” Lüdvik said, avoiding his brother’s question. “I’ll call you when I get to California. Please, don’t worry.”

    Lüdvik hung up the phone. He felt slightly faint and leaned against the patterned wallpaper. He stared at the family portraits that covered the hallway. Photographs of Cartwright and his family in round, wooden frames, stared back at him.

    He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his wallet. He unfolded two photographs and sank down to the floor.

    One photograph was of his family. It was frayed at the edges, but he could still make the details: his mother’s elegant and angular cheek line, his father’s round jowls and receding hairline. He and Izak stood together on one side of them, with Herschel, the next oldest, on the other. His younger siblings stood in tight semicircle in front.

    Lüdvik took out a second photograph, one he and Izak had taken the day they had arrived in New York City. They were both wearing new suits and hats, but that was where the similarity stopped. Lüdvik’s suit was impeccable, with his kerchief perfectly squared in his pocket, his hat tilted just right. Izak looked ill at ease in his suit, which had become wrinkled in the summer heat.

    “I promise you,” Lüdvik said and put the photos back into his pocket. “I will be all right.”

     

    “Lüdvik, Lüdvik,” Greta said softly as she reached into the backseat and nudged his shoulder softly.

    “Geesh, Greta,” Cartwright said as he pushed his foot down harder on the accelerator. “That’ll never do the trick.”

    The car swerved sharply, knocking Lüdvik over and jolting him out of his deep sleep.

    “That’s the ticket, Leo,” Cartwright said, laughing deeply. “Open those baby blues and take a look out!”

    Lüdvik rubbed his eyes and thought he must still be dreaming.

    The sky was orange and red, and stretched across the expanse as far as he could see. The colors matched the color of the ground in a seamless way. Deep, cavernous canyons went on forever. Lüdvik thought they must have driven off the earth entirely. He shook his head and pinched his thigh to see if he were still dreaming.

    Cartwright pulled the car over and turned off the engine.

    “Get out and stretch your legs,” Cartwright commanded. “You’ve been sleeping since Oklahoma.”

    Lüdvik opened the door and stepped out.

    “What is this place?” he asked.

    “Why, it’s the Grand Canyon, you knucklehead! Whad’ya think, that we landed on Mars?”

    With that Cartwright walked Lüdvik over to a chain link fence; the only barrier that separated the two from falling.

    “But how could a place like this happen?” Lüdvik said, and shook his head. “Izak will never believe that this place exists. Never!”

    “Greta, get the camera.”

    Greta reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small camera, one just like the Kodak Brownie Lüdvik had wanted, but which he decided was an extravagance.

    “Come on, let’s get you looking like a real American,” Cartwright said. He pulled Lüdvik in front of the Plymouth and directed him to cross his arms across his chest. “Yeah, just like that. You know, you’re just good looking enough to be a movie actor. I know some folks who owe me a favor, if it’s a line of work you’d like to try.”

    They took a series of photos and stood in front of the canyon until the sun perched just above the top rim.

    “We better get going,” Cartwright said and threw the keys to Lüdvik. “Arizona is wickedly brutal, even in winter. Greta, pour the man a cup of coffee and give him some breakfast. I’m going to get some shuteye. Make sure you wake me before we get to Nevada. I have a guy I need to see.”

    Greta glanced at Lüdvik in a way that made his stomach clench, and not from the lack of breakfast. He took one last look at the red horizon. Greta slid in next to him and as he turned the ignition, she formed her gloved hand into the shape of a gun against the red leather seat.

    “Don’t forget, Greta,” Cartwright said and yawned. “Wake me before Nevada.”

     

    They’d arrived in Boulder City, Nevada, just before dusk. Cartwright instructed Lüdvik to pull into a small coffee shop, where he downed a cold glass of milk and a slice of apple pie before excusing himself to the men’s room. He emerged a few minutes later, clean shaven and smiling.

    “Let’s show Leo the greatest engineering feat known to mankind,” he said and left two quarters on the table.

    The sound preceded their arrival. Bright white concrete glared and the thundering water seemed endless and was a stark contrast to the countless miles of desert they’d just passed through.

    “C’mon, you have to stand close to really experience it,” Cartwright grabbed Lüdvik by the arm. Greta held back and shook her head back and forth with a firm, no.

    “She’s afraid of heights,” he chuckled. “Boulder Dam. Took more than 20,000 men to build it. Can you imagine? More than 20,000. You know what you’re looking at, Leo.”

    Lüdvik looked at the rushing water and then back at Cartwright, then shook his head.

    Cartwright punched his fist onto the rail. “You’re looking at greatest country in the whole damn world.”

     

    The marquee read in tall black letters: “The Girl of the Golden West,” with the names Jeannette McDonald and Nelson Eddy underneath. Cartwright barely waited for Lüdvik and Greta to get out of the car before he peeled away in a dust cloud.

    Lüdvik and Greta settled into their seats as the newsreel starting playing. A young starlet, Judy Garland, was on the screen, waving and smiling from a flowered covered float. She was dressed in her Dorothy of Oz costume and seated next to her was a small black dog, whose wagging tail was in contrast to his growling and barking.

    The newsreel announcer’s voice took on a serious tone as a subtitle flashed across the screen: “Kindertransport, Jewish Children Leave Prague for London.”

    “We don’t have to stay, Lüdvik,” Greta said, taking a sharp breath in.

    Lüdvik didn’t respond back. His mind turned into slow motion as he scoured the faces of the children, who were waving. Groups of well-dressed parents, stood along a silver rail. They held and kissed their children. Also wearing their best clothing, the children, in twos, boarded a waiting airplane. The story ended with a close up of the pilot with a halo of blazing light behind him.

    “Maybe your brothers are on that plane,” she whispered. “Cartwright knows people in London.”

    She put her hand on top of his and squeezed it gently.

    “Let’s go get a drink,” she said. “I hate musicals.”

     

    The bar was empty, save for Greta and Lüdvik, who sat at a corner table. Lüdvik cradled a whiskey on ice, while Greta sipped at some brandy.

    “Sixteen years old? And why then?”

    Lüdvik let the harsh flavors linger on his tongue. He looked at Greta’s round and soft face and could see small puffs of face powder that had settled in the lines above her lips.

    He talked about the rabbi who had beaten his younger brother, Shmuel, and how his father had done nothing. Lüdvik explained that the rabbi would never punish the rich children, but instead would find a small infraction that one of the poorer children had done and beat them to send everyone a lesson. He’d been the subject of those beatings plenty of times and he was tough enough to take it, but when he saw the red welts on his 7-year-old brother’s back, it was a different story.

    “Your father wouldn’t do anything because he was a rabbi, yes?”

    Lüdvik nodded. He took a large swig and swallowed.

    “So you decided to take things into your own hands instead, right?” Greta motioned to the bartender for another brandy, as well as a second drink for Lüdvik.

    Lüdvik had waited in the bushes next to the rabbi’s house. Behind his hand he held a single ice skate, one that he shared with his brothers and sister to take turns with on the small pond just beyond their street. The blade was cold against his palm.

    The rabbi stepped onto his front stoop. With his hands behind his back, the rabbi began to walk quickly down the street. Lüdvik knew he was rushing to get to morning prayers before the school day started.

    Lüdvik gave the rabbi a head start.

    When the rabbi came to a small grove of trees, Lüdvik caught up with him.

    “If you ever touch anyone in my family again, I’ll finish the job,” Lüdvik said. He wiped the ice skate against the snow, leaving a thin, red stain, and threw it toward the trees.

    “That was the end of that,” Lüdvik said and pushed his empty glass to the edge of the table. “He never touched anyone again.”

    Greta shook her head and put her hand on Lüdvik’s, which sent a soft tingle up and down his spine.

    “My father made arrangements for me to learn the watch trade. I apprenticed while he worked to get me to Canada. It was probably for the best,” Lüdvik said, sliding his hand out from underneath Greta’s. “Should we go find Cartwright?”

    “He knows where to find us. This is where I always wait for him while he takes cares of his business.”

    From the way Greta emphasized the word business, Lüdvik knew whatever Cartwright was up to made her uneasy. He looked at her fingernails, something he did with all women, and saw that there was a reason she wore gloves most of the time. Her nails and cuticles were bitten to the quick.

    She withdrew her hands from the table.

    “The liquor was one thing; in those days, everyone was dying of thirst and Cartwright had the knack, is that what you call it? The knack of being in the right place at the right time. He’d deliver the booze to the big machers, the big whigs. They paid him in cars, furs and cash. But now that the booze is flowing free again,” Greta said and took a large gulp of her brandy, “he’s moved onto other things. Things that make me nervous.”

    Lüdvik remembered Greta’s hand forming the shape of a gun against the red leather upholstery.

    A gunrunner. A gangster. Oy, what have I gotten himself into this time?

     

    Cartwright appeared at the bar an hour later, reeking of whiskey and cigars. He reeled toward the table and slid into the seat next to Greta, planting a sloppy and wet kiss on her cheek.

    “Ugh, you’ve been drinking,” she said and wiped the kiss off with the back of her hand. “You smell like a brothel.”

    “You should have come with me, Leo,” Cartwright said. He motioned to the bartender, but Greta waved him off.

    “Sorry, buddy, but we’re closing up. Besides, you look like you’ve had more than enough,” the bartender said.

    “You’re a very wise man,” Cartwright shouted back. “I am fairly snonkered. Thank goodness we have our friend Leo here to drive. Where would we be without our handsome little friend from Czechoslovakia? How would my Pollack wife be kept amused from New York to California without him? Hey, I’ve got a great joke – a Pollack and a Czech walk into a bar…”

    “Cartwright, please,” Greta said, her face reddening with embarrassment.

    Lüdvik bought his glass down firmly on the table.

    “Let’s get on the road,” he said, staring into Cartwright’s drunken gaze. “You promised me I’d see the sunset over the Pacific by tomorrow.”

     

    Lüdvik pushed down on the accelerator. He was in no mood to linger in this town, and it wasn’t until they were in the open space of the desert that he was able to get the image of the kindertransport out of his mind.

    Lüdvik looked past the windshield to endless sky and open space. Low growing grasses hugged the ground, with sand dunes rising and falling in rhythm with the movement of the car. He felt as if he were Lawrence of Arabia; a book he’d poured over countless times at the library.

    “Beautiful, yes?” Greta said. They’d been silent since they’d left the bar.

    “Don’t be angry at him,” Greta continued. “He only gets like that when he drinks too much. He saved my life, you know. I was a starving little nothing when we met. Just off the boat and with nothing and no one. He was working the docks and saw me. He gave me the coat off his back. Took me to the corner store and bought me a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup. I hate to think what would have become of me.”

    Greta pulled her expensive coat around her tightly.

    “Greta?” Cartwright’s voice came from the backseat. “Pour me a cup of coffee, would ya? I’ll give Leo here a break from driving and you can get some shut eye.”

    Greta handed the Thermos cup carefully to Cartwright, who was leaning forward between her and Lüdvik. He finished one cup and then another, then tapped on Lüdvik’s shoulder, instructing him to pull over.

    “I’m fine, Cartwright,” Lüdvik said. “I don’t need a break.”

    “Just pull over,” Cartwright insisted. “I need to see a man about a leak.”

    Lüdvik shook his head and eased over to side of the road. Cartwright stumbled out the back and walked behind a large shrub. Greta looked the other way and climbed into the backseat.

    “Slide on over, partner,” Cartwright said. “I’ll take us into Los Angeles from here. This way you can take in the view. Besides, we have some talking to do.”

     

    The San Gabriel Mountains surprised Lüdvik. They were jagged and gray, so different than the first mountains he’d seen when he arrived in Nova Scotia a decade before. Those were deep green and rolled out in gentle waves. He lost count of the sage colored yucca plants and twisted pine trees they’d passed and he wanted to stop to look at them further, but Cartwright was too busy talking to be interrupted.

    “The liquor was a way out of a trail to nowhere,” Cartwright said. “I was just good looking enough to get the small bits in the movies, but the stuff bored me to tears. And there’s no money in it, unless you’re a Douglas Fairbanks. But I learned quickly that movie stars like their liquor and I knew where to get it. It was that simple. But things changed when the feds opened the gin mills again. Changed, and became more interesting.”

    “Did you think about joining the army?” Lüdvik asked.

    “Tried to, but the hearing in my left ear isn’t so good. Too close to a gunshot on a set,” Cartwright answered. “But I serve this country in other ways.

    “You know, there’re a lot of people in your part of the world who are working ‘behind the scenes’ to stop Hitler and his cronies,” Cartwright said and looked into the rearview mirror. Greta was fast asleep. “I help supply them with what they need.”

    Lüdvik jerked his head toward his companion.

    “Don’t worry,” Cartwright continued. “I wouldn’t involve you. Unless you really want to learn the business. I could use a man like you. Get the feel of things and think about it. You could end up being a very wealthy man. A real American success story.”

    They sped by a grove of trees and Lüdvik took in a deep breath.

    “Oranges,” he said.

    Cartwright swerved to the side of the rode. He jumped out and ran into the small orchard, returning with his arms full. Laughing, he poured the armful into Lüdvik’s lap.

    “Welcome to California!”

     

    “I promised you’d see the sunset in California,” Cartwright said. He and Lüdvik stood on the beach, their pant legs rolled up to their shins.

    Lüdvik had no words to express what he was seeing. A huge golden orb rolled along the water’s horizon, lowering a little bit with each breath he took.

    “Nothing like it in the world,” Cartwright sighed. “I could afford a bigger house and Greta is itching to have one, but I don’t want to give up this.”

    “It’s like a dream,” Lüdvik said.

    The two men stood and watched the sun lower, which seemed to take an eternity before it was just suddenly gone, leaving behind streaks of purple, orange, and red.

    “C’mon, we’d better head back. Greta’s making a real Polish spread to welcome us home. You’ll have plenty of sunsets to catch,” Cartwright said.

     

    “Izzy, it’s paradise,” Lüdvik whispered into the phone. “Orange groves and palm trees. Anything is possible here, I can feel it. No cold winter, no gray people or buildings. And the light, the light is like silver!”

    Lüdvik waited for a response from his older brother.

    “When will you be back?” Izak answered. “You’ve probably lost the few hours you did have at Gimbels. Those kinds of jobs don’t grow on trees, despite what your friend will tell you.”

    Lüdvik could hear the tension in Izak’s voice.

    “It’s late, Lüdvik,” Izak said with a sigh. “I have to go to bed. Don’t get sick on the oranges.”

    Lüdvik hung up the phone, which was located in the little bedroom he was staying in. It was the first room he’d ever had to himself. He looked around at the simply decorated room and could feel Greta’s old world touches. He could stay in this room forever.

     

    At first, Lüdvik did odd jobs around the house. He fixed the roof, got rid of the squeaky back door, and sealed the cracks in the driveway. At the end of each week, he’d wire half his money to his brother, putting in an extra dollar or two.

    The first real job Cartwright sent him on was simple – deliver gin and cigars to a mansion in Beverly Hills. He’d never seen a place so massive and regal, not one that people actually lived in. He rang the doorbell and a dark-skinned man answered, dressed in a tuxedo. He took the delivery and instructed Lüdvik to wait.

    A tall and very handsome man sauntered down the marble stairwell. A movie star. The man shook Lüdvik’s hand with vigor and smiled a broad smile. He handed him a thick envelope.

    “Did my man offer you a drink?”

    Lüdvik shook his head, no.

    “Foster,” shouted the man. “Bring some lemonade. The Santa Anas are making everyone thirsty. So, you’re Cartwright’s new delivery guy, huh? He and I go way back.”

    The movie star ushered Lüdvik through the house. He opened a back door to something Lüdvik had never seen before – a swimming pool. It was the shape of a figure eight and had graceful stone figures of unclad men on either side.

    “Albert, say hello to Cartwright’s new delivery boy,” the movie star said. A tanned hand rose up and waved to Lüdvik in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable.

    “You’re more than welcome to take a dip in the pool to cool off,” Albert offered.

    “I have more deliveries to make,” Lüdvik answered.

    “Say, I have an idea,” the movie star said. “I could use a good-looking guy like you in my next film. We start in a couple of days. Just come to the lot and tell them Ronnie told them to let you in. And if you have any friends like you, tell them to come too. Whad’ya say your name was?”

    “Leo,” Lüdvik said. “Leo Lendl.”

    The butler handed Lüdvik a tall glass of lemonade. He drank it quickly and put it back on the waiting silver tray.

     

    Sundays were his days off, so early the next morning, Lüdvik showed up at the film lot. To his surprise, he was allowed inside and instructed to head to Back Lot No. 3, where a bus was waiting.

    The bus lurched out of the studio and headed through the streets of Los Angeles until they got to a field. A makeshift factory town had been constructed and Lüdvik saw large movie cameras on stands. A man with a clipboard instructed Lüdvik, and the other men who had also ridden on the bus, to follow him.

    fiction_contest_call_to_action

    Each man was handed overripe tomatoes. They were told to throw the tomatoes in the direction of the lead actor, who was the movie star Lüdvik had met the day before. He was standing on a platform and seemed to be delivering a speech of some kind. Some of the men were holding placards that had slogans on them that Lüdvik didn’t really understand, but he did what he was told to do. He and the others pounded the movie star with the tomatoes, hitting his bright white shirt and pressed pants, but not his face. They’d been given strict instructions to not let even one tomato seed hit his face. Anyone who did wouldn’t get their day’s pay.

    Lüdvik was amazed at how long this process took. They’d throw the tomatoes until someone would call “cut,” at which point the movie star would be ushered away and would then return with a newly bright white shirt and pressed pants. They must have used a truckload of overripe tomatoes until another person yelled, “That’s a wrap.”

    Lüdvik wasn’t even sure that the movie star knew he had been there.

     

    The house was empty and the Plymouth was gone. A bowl of borscht was on the table with a slab of bread, which Lüdvik finished off quickly. He placed three tomatoes in a bowl and left them on the counter.

    Lüdvik was going to call Izak to tell him about his crazy day when he saw a letter on his pillow.

    Dear Leo,

    You have to get out of here tonight. I’ve booked a ticket for a train back to New York for you; even got you a room, so you can travel in style, plus a little extra for you and your brother.

    Things have turned sour for me and there’s going to be a raid. I can handle it and so can Greta, but if you get mixed up in this mess, you’ll be thrown out of the country and we both know what that will mean.

    Take care of yourself.

    The letter was signed by both of them, and next to Greta’s signature was the imprint of her lipstick. Lüdvik brought the letter to his nose. Jasmine.

     

    Lüdvik exchanged the room ticket for a single seat. He leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes. He put his hand inside his coat jacket and gently tapped at the letter. Should be enough, he thought, enough for two tickets back to California.

    He felt the city fade into the valley and then into the desert. It was dusk, exactly the same time he’d arrived almost two months to the day.

    He craned his neck and caught the last glimpse of the setting sun, just as the train took a wide turn away from the sinking red and orange ball. SEP Logo Reverse

     

    Bavaria for Lovers

    My hands are gripped around Jamie’s waist as I ride behind him on the back of a brand-new BMW motorcycle we rented in Munich. For the next five nights we will drive Bavaria’s Romantic Road, a 220-mile scenic route considered a German favorite that very few Americans have heard of, much less seen. Our first stop is the extraordinary Neuschwanstein Castle, on which Disney modeled Sleeping Beauty Castle.

    I feel exactly like Sleeping Beauty with Jamie Anthony as my Prince Charming. Two years ago, we met unexpectedly at a blues club in New York City. I was wearing my T-shirt from the Blues Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a festival that Jamie had also attended, so he introduced himself. I was smitten with his Southern accent (he’s from Atlanta) plus he was charming, smart, and attractive. Like me, he’d been divorced twice, thought Internet dating was a waste of time, and loved the blues.

    Then he told me he loved riding his motorcycle, and I imagined black leather, silver studs, and tattoos, even though I saw none on his arms. On our third date, he invited me to join him on a motorcycle ride promising that if I didn’t like it, we’d turn around. Outfitted in protective helmets, ballistic jackets, and leather gloves, we left Manhattan bound for Bear Mountain State Park, a lovely wooded outpost just north of the northern New York City suburbs. I expected to hate riding on a motorcycle and was sure I’d want him to turn around after a couple of blocks, but it was exhilarating looking up at the skyscrapers from an entirely new perspective and, further north, watching the boats sail along the Hudson. It was also very sensual being tucked in against his body.

    Since then, we’ve done some day trips by motorcycle, but never a weeklong trip in which everything we’re taking has to fit into three small cases attached to the bike. What’s even crazier is that this trip, traveling by motorcycle in a foreign country, was my idea. When I first mentioned the idea of this scenic drive by motorcycle, Jamie broke into a smile as wide as a four-lane highway, and that was it.

    Couple sitting near motorcycle on Romantic Road in Germany
    Roadies: Author Margie Goldsmith and Jamie Anthony pause to take in the view. (Photo courtesy Margie Goldsmith)

    The Romantic Road route was partially based on an old trade route and on the Roman Via Claudia Augusta. During World War II it was called Germany Travel Path No. 1 and used to transport troops and supplies. In 1950, hoping to attract tourists and change its evil reputation, some clever marketing folks considered changing the name to the Romantic Road for Couples Who Fall in Love, then shortened it to the Romantic Road. And that’s exactly what it is, a region of Germany that has existed unchanged for centuries.

    On the first day of our ride, a short trip from Füssen to Schwangau, we pass golden hayfields with round bales of hay glittering in the sun and pillowy hillsides laid out like patchwork quilts in every shade of green from emerald to lime. Wildflowers line the roadside, sunlight streams through groves of trees, and we pass herds of sheep and cows and dairies where we inhale the pungent smell of manure — in this context, a fresh and pure odor.

    Schwangau is home to King Ludwig II’s 19th-century castle Neuschwanstein, one of the most photographed castles in the world. Ludwig, who was crowned king when he was just 18, was in love with Richard Wagner and created the castle and every room in it to depict the composer’s operas. Unfortunately, Ludwig’s love not only went unrequited, but Wagner married the wife of a famous music conductor, breaking poor Ludwig’s heart.

    Rothenburg ob der Tauber
    Small town, big reputation: Rothenburg ob der Tauber is one of Germany’s oldest and best preserved medieval towns. The hidden gem is encircled by massive 14th-century stone walls, out of which rise 42 ancient towers. (Shutterstock)

    Our love is anything but unrequited, whether we’re walking hand in hand down crooked cobblestone lanes beneath the Alps in 12th-century Füssen, or sharing steaming plates of sausages, which seem to be the primary local fare. There’s bratwurst (pork sausage), weisswurst (white steamed veal or pork sausage), blutwurst (blood sausage), wiener (hotdog), and short and plump Regensburger wurst (boiled sausage with a pork filling). Every dish in Bavaria is served with potatoes or egg noodles and, always, sauerkraut. At one meal, I request a vegetable substitute for the potatoes and the waitress seems puzzled as she says, “But you have vegetable: sauerkraut!” Jamie and I squeeze each other’s knees under the table and try not to burst out laughing.

    As we ride along each day, one of my favorite things is the sight of an onion-domed church in the distance, meaning we’re about to arrive in a medieval village where we’ll spend the night. It also means we didn’t get lost, which happens occasionally. Because voices can’t be heard above the sound of the engine, when I see a sign for the correct destination ahead, I stroke Jamie’s shoulder as if to say, “Nice job, sweetie, we made it.” Mostly I communicate by pointing as if to say, “look over there to that beautiful field full of sunflowers or fir tree forest or field polka-dotted with sheep,” just in case he didn’t see it. We’ve also made up our own signs. When I make a closed fist it means stop (usually for a photo), and when I make two closed fists, it means stop, take off your helmet, and kiss me.Bavaria_PQ

    The hotels we have chosen are not posh, but they are comfortable and each offers something special. (For suggested lodgings and restaurants along the route, see
    saturdayeveningpost.com/romantic-road.) In Füssen, we sit on our private balcony overlooking the lapis-lazuli-colored lake and watch the sun sink behind the Alps; in Augsburg, our room has a heart-shaped bathtub; and in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, we squeeze into the tiny elevator and remain locked in an embrace all the way up to our floor.

    Each morning begins with a huge breakfast buffet of eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausages, cold cuts, cereals, yogurts, fresh fruits, rolls, muffins, and — my favorite — pretzel bread. Afterward, we wander the town, following cobblestoned alleyways past medieval walls and houses, into museums as beautiful as the art within, and inside Gothic churches with dazzling frescoes.

    By midday we are loading our stuff into the bike’s cases and setting off toward our next destination, none more than 50 miles away. Before this trip, I always thought of driving as simply a way of getting from point A to point B, but here the drives are like a reset button. I don’t have a care in the world, and can think about nothing except enjoying the magnificent scenery with my man.

    It’s also fascinating to learn the love stories of Germany’s most romantic cities such as Augsburg, the birthplace of Bertholt Brecht, Hans Holbein, and Mozart’s father, Leopold. It was in Augsburg that Leopold’s son Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fell in love with his first cousin, but he lost interest. The young Mozart next fell in love with Aloysia Weber from Mannheim, but she rejected him. Mozart wrote to his father, “I can only weep. I have far too sensitive a heart,” and then courted Aloysia’s sister, Constanze, whom he married. At their wedding, the bride, the groom, the priest, and the entire congregation wept.

    That evening, Jamie calls to me from the shower. I figure he’s left the shampoo on the sink, but no, he wants me to join him. I don’t think I’ve taken a shower with a guy since I was 30, but I eagerly step in, and we embrace under the running water, giggling like kids. For a brief moment I wonder what would happen if we slipped on the tub floor and one of us broke a hip. Later, we lie contentedly on the bed, listening to the church bells toll the hour.

    In Germany, love is so often associated with music, especially along the Romantic Road. When Beethoven was 20, he played viola in the concert hall at Bad Mergentheim, a 14th-century village with a medieval castle. One legend has it that he was supposed to leave for Vienna to meet Mozart, but Beethoven missed the opportunity because he fell in love with a local girl. Beethoven was nearly always in love; one was a 16-year-old countess, a pupil of his, to whom he dedicated the Moonlight Sonata.

    Residential Palace Wurzburg
    Architectural masterpiece: Completed in 1780, Würzburg Residence is a three-winged palace containing more than 300 Baroque and Rococo rooms that was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981. (Shutterstock)

    Sharing the moonlight with Jamie on the Main Bridge in Würzburg feels as romantic as any Beethoven sonata. In the middle of the bridge is a small bar where visitors can buy a glass of wine and stand overlooking the river. There, we meet a historian who tells us about Walther von der Vogelweide, a famous 12th- and 13th-century love poet who wandered from court to court, reciting poems in exchange for food and lodging. In 1230 when Von der Vogelweide died, he was buried in Würzburg, leaving instructions that the birds were to be fed daily at his tomb. But instead of birdfeed, lovesick visitors arrive with fresh flowers to leave on his grave. “It is said that when the flowers wilt, lovesick hearts will heal,” the historian tells us and then adds, “In the winter, they bring flowers that last longer.”

    Jamie and I look at each other and smile. He squeezes my hand. How lucky I am that I don’t need to leave flowers at the love poet’s grave. And neither does Jamie.

     

    Editor’s Note: Margie and Jamie were engaged in November in Bali and married December 13, 2014.



    Margie Goldsmith’s “Bavaria for Lovers” won a 2015 North American Travel Journalists Association Silver Prize.

    And Now, Let Us Stray

    Regular churchgoing, according to recent studies, is associated with several unintended benefits. For example, reduced risk of cancer. Better heart health. Also, more satisfactory sex. Who among us wouldn’t unleash a mighty “Hallelujah!” if guaranteed such blessings in exchange for simply parking ourselves in a pew every week?

    Well, as it turns out, the answer is lots of people. The trend is indisputable: Americans are increasingly averse to conventional religion and religious services. The gusto has gone out of group prayer, and not just because we prefer to sleep in on Sunday mornings. One in five of us does not even associate with a major faith anymore.

    What’s filling the void, then? For some folks, the newly birthed Sunday Assembly is an answer.

    The Sunday what? Founded just two years ago in England, the Sunday Assembly movement has been sweeping the U.S. at hyper-speed. During one record-breaking week last September, 36 towns welcomed Assemblies for the first time.

    An assembly gathering typically lasts an hour. Imagine: pop music to begin (“I Will Survive” is a winner), then maybe a little dancing, speeches about adventure or science or human survival, some poetry, and whoosh — you’re out the door. It’s Tony Robbins meets Joel Osteen meets TED Talks that aren’t profound enough to be actual TED Talks. When a baby is born, the occasion is of course observed. That’s the way this so-called “godless church” rolls. For many — including Christians, Jews, and others — Sunday Assembly serves as a full-fledged spiritual community. It may not be holy, but it is functional.

    So, is this a good thing? A dangerous thing? A blasphemy and a threat to paid pastors everywhere? Frankly those questions are irrelevant at this point. Individuals flock to the Assembly because “it is about replacing certain aspects of religion that they miss, especially the experience of being part of a morally minded … congregational environment that many people cherished as kids,” writes Phil Zuckerman in his just-published book, Living the Secular Life. These people have already abandoned the faith of their parents.

    Who’d be deluded enough these days to try launching a from-the-ground-up church? You’d need to be some sort of crackpot or comic to believe this had any shot of taking root. Exactly! The founders of Sunday Assembly, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, are in fact two London comedians. But their creation is no joke. “People want to think about improving themselves and helping other people and doing all of that in a community where you forge strong relationships,” said Jones, in an interview.

    Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, told me, “I’m excited about Sunday Assembly. It reaches people who haven’t been reached before in the nontheistic movement. The orientation is to younger, career-oriented people.”

    One might understandably assume then that this un-churchy church appeals chiefly to a bicoastal, nihilistic crowd. Not so. Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard University, who consulted with Jones and Evans as they organized Sunday Assembly, told me, “The big trope in the secular movement used to be that the Bible Belt was not where you’d ever find agnostics or atheists.” Maybe in the past, but not now. Today, Epstein notes, folks who distrust God and the supernatural live everywhere among us.

    Does the Assembly have a long-term future in America? Possibly, but its prospects ought not to be overstated. “The people who are doing Sunday Assembly should have no doubt that others have tried to create alternative communities in the past, in every century,” Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of the best-selling book Doubt: A History, said to me. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You should be at peace knowing you are part of the flow of history.”

    Meet the 2015 Great American Fiction Contest Prize Winners

    We’re pleased to announce N. West Moss the winner of our 2015 Great American Fiction Contest! Read her prize-winning story “Omeer’s Mangoes” and the stories from our five runners-up below.

    Read all the winning stories from the Great American Fiction Contest 2015:
     
    Winner

    Runners-Up

    Click here to purchase the collection, which includes 21 additional stories not available online.

    Enter The Saturday Evening Post 2016 Great American Fiction Contest; click here.

    Meet the Winner!

    N. West Moss
    N. West Moss

    N. West Moss

    “Am I dreaming?” asked Moss when notified her story “Omeer’s Mangoes” had won first place, publication in print and online, and a prize of $500. “I am thrilled beyond belief to be in a publication I hold in such high esteem.”

    Her vividly written story drew inspiration from real-life events. “My father died last year, and about a month later, my mother and I went to New York City to visit the apartment that my parents kept for 30 years,” says Moss. “It sits right across the street from Bryant Park. When we got there, the doorman — also there for 30 years — greeted us, took my mother’s hand and asked, ‘How is Mr. Moss?’ Informed my father had died, the doorman froze, then turned to the wall and wept. His sobbing in the corner of the lobby over my father’s death was the spark for ‘Omeer’s Mangoes.’

    ‘Omeer’s Mangoes’ is my first piece of fiction to reach a national audience,” says Moss. “The New York Times published an essay back in 2008, and that was exciting and unexpected. But this is exciting in a completely different way. Having people read my fiction feels much more vulnerable because it is entirely mine in a way that nonfiction skirts.”

    After graduating with her MFA from William Paterson University in 2013 at age 49, Moss took a year off to write full-time —“5 to 10 hours each day.” She has won several awards — the Faulkner-Wisdom Award and Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction — for her work, which has appeared primarily in literary journals, including The Westchester Review, The Blotter, and Hospital Drive.

    Meet the Runners-Up

    Each runner-up receives $100 and publication of his or her work on our website. (To read the prize-winning stories, click the titles below.) We salute these fine writers and the more than 200 others who entered our 2015 contest.

    Sarah Gerard
    Sarah Gerard (by Josh Wool)

    Sarah Gerard

    Title: “Sideshow”

    Story Line: On a trip to Coney Island, an alienated father and son renew their bond.

    Bio: First short story published by national consumer publication; Gerard’s first novel Binary Star publishes on January 13, 2015 (Two Dollar Radio Press).

    Jim Gray
    Jim Gray

    Jim Gray

    Title: “Nothing but the Truth”

    Story Line:An uncle returns from WWII
    a changed man. Some injuries you simply can’t see.

    Bio: Published mysteries in Woman’s World magazine; published stories in literary magazines.

    Mathieu Cailler
    Mathieu Cailler

    Mathieu Cailler

    Title: “Party of Two”

    Story Line:When a world-weary, middle-aged couple witnesses a young pair kissing in a restaurant booth, it stirs memories of first love and lost love.

    Bio:Published story in Post’s online series New Fiction Friday; first short-story collection, Loss Angeles, due out in February 2015 (Short Story America Press).

    Lisa Trank
    Lisa Trank (by Jack Greene Photography)

    Lisa Trank

    Title: “1939 Plymouth, or The Bootlegger’s Driver”

    Story Line: Immigrant Lüdvik Lendle loves America, a country where anything is possible. But on a road trip across America, he wonders what he has gotten himself into.

    Bio: First short story published by national consumer publication; currently working on first young adult novel, Tangled Chimes.

    Myrna West
    Myrna West

    Myrna West

    Title: “The Three of Us”

    Story Line: Laurie thought she knew everything about Paula, the brilliant and beautiful ex-wife of her fiancé, John.

    Bio: First short story published by national consumer publication.

     

    Only Balonely

    When Dan lost his folks so suddenly, it was a pretty big shock to all of us. His grandmother had been living in a little house behind their place in Denver. So, he did what he said was the only decent thing. He brought Gran here to live with him. Yeah, he always called her Gran. Well, that shows you what sort of guy he is, heart of gold. Salt of the earth. Naturally, having your grandmother move in with you when you’re what? twenty-eight? can present some challenges. Believe me, it did.

    To tell this story properly, I guess I’d better back up a bit. Quite a bit. All the way back to S.S. Dillow Elementary, back in 1964, when Danny and I became best friends. He was a picky kid. And that’s putting it nicely, if you know what I mean. He didn’t like it if the different foods on his plate were touching one another. You know? We became friends because we both liked Batman. Not the comics so much, but the TV show with Adam West. Then, we both really liked Star Trek. Then we liked action films, then motorcycles. There was always something to keep us bonded as we grew up. His pickiness, maybe it was OCD, I don’t know. Sometimes that could be annoying, but still he was my closest buddy.

    Up until he was 10 years old he brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to school in his lunch bag every day. I don’t mean sometimes. I mean every day. If his mom tried to pack him something else, he just wouldn’t eat it. Then he went to visit Gran one summer and somehow she introduced him to baloney. When he came home, nothing would do but baloney. Every single day.

    We got interested in girls at the same time. Double-dated some. I got married to Linda my second year in college. Dan had been seeing a girl named Valerie. They were engaged, but she dumped him suddenly. He never really got over it. I think it was about that time that his mom, God rest her, pulled me aside one day and asked me to stay close to Dan. She was afraid, with his quirks and all, that he might end up lonely, friendless. I told her I would. He’s my best friend, after all. Always has been.

    Anyways, after college we were both working at Allied Media Duplication, out at the Las Colinas Communications Complex. We’d both been interested in movies since we were kids. The closest we got to Hollywood was duplicating VHS tapes. I guess because I was a little more outgoing, I moved up to customer service pretty quickly. Danny was stuck back there among the duplication racks, often by himself, so I made it a point to have lunch with him as much as possible. He’d bring the same sad little brown bag to work every day with, you guessed it, a baloney sandwich.

    It was around that time, 1983 maybe, that Gran came to live with him. What a ray of sunshine she was. Her full name is Iris Catherine McCullough, and let me tell you, everybody took to Iris instantly. She never met a stranger. With those piercing blue eyes, you just couldn’t help but fall in love with her. Soon as she moved in everybody, the grocer, the mailman, the complex manager, all the neighbors, they were all best friends with Iris.

    Well, Iris had a way of stirring things up. One day she sees Dan making his lunch for work, baloney sandwich for the millionth time, and she says, “That’s a pretty ba-lonely sandwich, Danny.”

    He thinks she’s getting older and maybe careless with her pronunciation, so he just says, “Thanks, Gran.”

    She glared at him with those blue eyes. “I said ba-LONELY, not baloney. That is just the saddest sandwich I’ve ever seen.” Iris launches in on how he’s a grown man now, not a little boy, and he shouldn’t be so damn rigid. You know the drill. Anyway, Dan doesn’t budge. And you know, she was right. About the sandwich, I mean. Those baloney sandwiches were having a definite adverse effect on his social life. There had been nice, single girls working at Allied. I could tell Dan liked one or two of them. He was shy, though. And in the break room, once they saw that pathetic little sandwich with one thin little slice of pink baloney? Well, you can imagine the sorts of thoughts that might go through a young woman’s mind. Is the guy a pauper? What’s the deal? I remember two or three young ladies giving him that look after they saw the sandwich.

    So one day Iris decides to take matters into her own hands. She hides Dan’s alarm clock so he oversleeps. Claims later she was dusting and just mislaid it. Anyways, Dan wakes up, freaking out because he didn’t get up at exactly the same time he always had. Iris calms him down, says, “You’ve been working so hard, Danny, I thought you were just giving yourself a little extra rest. When I saw it was getting later, I went ahead and made your lunch. Here, see?” She hands him a brown bag and probably heaved a sigh of relief when he walked out with it without checking the contents. Still, as quirky as he is, he must’ve noticed it was a little heavier.

    Boy, I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was sitting next to Dan when he unwrapped the sandwich. No baloney. Meatloaf. Iris had packed him a huge meatloaf sandwich. Yeah, that was a shocker! He was just sitting there staring at it like it was a dog turd or something. That’s when the new receptionist, Barbara, happens by. Yes, that Barbara. And what a knock-out she was. She looked down at that sandwich with the slab of meatloaf on it and says, “Some sandwich there. You guys really like your manly sandwiches, don’t you? What is that meatloaf?”

    OK, first, since Valerie had dumped him, as far as I know, that was the first time a pretty lady had given him the time of day. Second, I don’t think the word “manly” had ever been linked to him in any way, form, or fashion for his entire life. Like I say, Barbara was a knockout. Well, still is. And get this: Danny boy shocked the hell out of me by responding, “Yeah, it’s a pretty satisfying sandwich.” Not Where the hell did this meatloaf come from? Not I want my baloney! But, just sort of nonchalantly that he found it to be a satisfying sandwich. I didn’t know if he was possessed or what. I never could’ve seen that coming! So, Barbara asks if she can sit with us. We say sure. I hurry up and finish my lunch, so they’ll have some time alone.

    That Iris! The meatloaf was her idea, but how could she have known the impact it would have? I don’t know, she’s inscrutable. She’s got her little ways. Maybe she’s a witch. Just kidding. When Dan got home, she asked him how his day had gone. He didn’t rant about her switching out his sandwich. He said he’d had a decent day. She asked him how he liked the meatloaf sandwich. “It was good,” he said.

    Not long after that, when I was alone with her, I told her what had happened with Barbara in the lunch room. Iris’ beautiful blue eyes just lit up. Her head sort of danced on her shoulders as she visualized what I’d told her. “So,” she said, “Danny boy’s gone from ba-lonely to meet ’n greet loaf! Let’s see how we can push this trend along.” I had no idea what she’d come up with next, but I trusted she had Dan’s best interests at heart. She always did.

    The thing with the meatloaf had worked out so well, Dan began requesting meatloaf. Iris knew he was in danger of becoming as addicted to meatloaf as he had been to baloney. So one day, after he’s packed a meatloaf sandwich, she switches bags. The new bag has a beautiful shrimp salad in it. Colorful, full of fresh ingredients, like you might get at a really fancy restaurant. At lunchtime, when Barbara sees that shrimp salad she goes gaga. “I love shrimp!” she croons, “Can I have a taste?” Naturally, Dan gave her all she wanted. By the end of lunch that day, I heard her say, “You know, Dan, we like so many of the same things. We should have dinner sometime. You know, like a date.” She winked at him. He was stunned. I was stunned.

    Iris! I’ve got to hand it to her! The hook was set. Dan just had to reel that beautiful fish in. But, would he have the nerve to actually ask her out? Really, she’d already asked him out. The ball was in his court. What would he do?

    A few days passed and it seemed like he was going to blow the opportunity. Before he got up the nerve to actually make a date with her, Iris solved the problem once more. She asked him if he would mind if she had a friend join them for dinner on Saturday. “Sure,” he says, thinking it’s one of her old lady friends from church or bingo. Imagine his surprise when Barbara walks through the door at 7 o’clock that Saturday night. I bet his poor, dumb jaw just hit the floor. I’d give a bundle to be able to go back in time and witness that firsthand. Seems Iris and Barbara had been shopping at the same grocery store and had become friends, coincidentally. Yeah, right, coincidentally, sure. The only woman that gives Dan a second thought, the only one he’s ready to fall in love with, and they accidentally shop at the same grocery store? Give me a break. Where Iris is concerned, nothing ever just happens. She’s a mastermind, I tell you. Barbara was ecstatic. “I can’t believe Iris is your grandmother,” she cried, giving him a big, spontaneous hug.

    Well, that was that. The rest as they say is history. They dated. Barbara was over at their place all the time after that. Heck, I think Barbara fell in love with Iris as much as she fell for Dan. Who wouldn’t? They were married later that year. I was best man at the wedding. They had their reception right here in this same hall. Hard to believe their daughter, Sandy, is already old enough to be getting married. It did my heart good to see him giving her away today. Lovely ceremony, wasn’t it? They’re such a nice-looking couple. Time sure flies.

    Yes, I swear. Every word of that story I just told you is true.

    Huh? What became of Iris? She’s doing great. At 94 she still drives a car, if you can believe that! Yeah, that’s her over there dancing with the groom’s father. Cuts a hell of a rug, that Iris. Look at her go!

    ___

    Irving Berlin on ‘White Christmas’

    Christmas ornaments
    Christmas Ornaments
    The Saturday Evening Post
    John Atherton
    December 18, 1943

    Just about every American knows the words to the holiday tune popularized during World War II. But when the song “White Christmas” was composed, Irving Berlin had no idea it would be such a huge hit. Below is a 1951 article from the SEP archive, in which the famous composer reveals the secret behind the success of “White Christmas”:

    Sure Sign That Christmas Is Coming

    The Saturday Evening Post, November 17, 1951
    By Robert M. Yoder

    In 1939, Irving Berlin completed a sheaf of songs for a movie to be called Holiday Inn and looked them over with an expert eye. Along with being a composer and the greatest source of musical accompaniment for America’s festive occasions, Berlin is a publisher. It’s his business to know how a song will go. Only two of these looked hopeful. In Berlin’s estimation, “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” had a chance of becoming a hit. He expected a modest success, but no more, for a song called “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.”

    Berlin has seldom been fooled by songs. This one fooled him completely. Of all his music — gay, sentimental or patriotic — it became “definitely the most successful,” he says. That means topping such stand-bys as “God Bless America,” which has earned well over $100,000 for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, to whom Berlin assigned the royalties. “White Christmas” outsells even it.

    What Berlin created, without in the least suspecting it, was a musical composition akin to Old Faithful, the geyser. It’s a rare song hit that survives the brief, intense popularity of its first success and becomes a “standard,” played year in and year out. White Christmas enjoys the rarest status of all — that of a perennial, automatic, ever-successful hit.

    Every October for 10 years now, as surely as the leaves begin to fall, it begins to sell anew like a fresh hit. In a day when sheet-music sales of 300,000 are considered very good, it runs to well over 3 zmillion copies. “It’s a publishing business in itself,” Berlin remarks, meaning that one such song alone would keep a publisher happy.

    The radio stations start playing it on Thanksgiving Day — in very cautious amounts, actually, compared to the repetition of jukeboxes. From Thanksgiving until midnight Christmas Day, there isn’t a minute when the song isn’t in the air somewhere. It is far more widespread than snow. In Vermont, a Christmas program would sound vaguely unofficial without it, though there may be 8 inches of cold reality outside to make this dream a little unnecessary. But they sing it just as often in Louisiana and Florida and tropical places never touched by a snowflake.

    Played “to death” in 1942, the year the song appeared, “White Christmas” has been played to death every year since, but doesn’t die. For somewhere along the line it underwent a subtle transformation: It became a custom. A Gallup poll showed that of all the traditional Christmas music, only the classic “Silent Night, Holy Night” is a greater favorite. “Jingle Bells” and a dozen famous carols and hymns had to yield to Berlin’s wistful air.

    “The proof that I didn’t expect this,” the composer says, “is in the verse.” For this is not, as thousands suppose, the expression of an American soldier honing for Christmas at home. According to the verse, it is the lament of a Northerner stuck in California, and beefing about spending Christmas under the palms. When it was written, anyone with the price of a railroad ticket or a few gallons of gasoline could easily attain a White Christmas. But by the time the song appeared in 1942, millions of Americans were overseas. So it came to represent the longing for an old-fashioned Christmas in a world at peace.

    A seasonal, topical song is born with two strikes on it. Christmas, furthermore, is perhaps the single occasion with which popular-song writers have had the least luck. Why should this prove such a resounding exception? Berlin explains its success by saying he had thousands of collaborators. “People read a lot of things into that song,” he remarks, “that I didn’t put there.”