It is New Year’s Eve and Orlo
and Leini sit side-by-side on a bench at the corner of Light and Redwood
streets in downtown Baltimore to witness the passing of another year in their heroic
adultery.
They’d arrived late in the afternoon
from different directions, choosing downtown for its view of the dying day:
gray sky bruising to plum, factory lights sparkling on the oil-slicked harbor
as the city waited for the last party of the year.
Orlo peels an orange and the sticky
spray chafes his skin. Leini trades him slices of hard, white cheese for pieces
of the fruit. She is 54 and her beauty has fared better than she. Orlo, older
by a dozen years, cracks the heel off a hunk of day-old bread and gives her
half.
Between nibbles, Leini buries her
hands in her coat. She is married and Orlo - who makes a living sifting through
the debris of other people’s lives - is not.
Pitiful?
What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?
Buses come and buses go, riders
getting on and off as the crowd swirls blind to the middle-aged lovers on the
bench. By the time everyone is in sight of their midnight truths, Orlo will be
waiting on a roomful of clocks to strike 12 at the same time and Leini will
pace her tiny kitchen with a stained wooden spoon.
She will argue with her teenage
daughter - named for her mother, the girl can not go out until Leini gets home
and then can not go far - and she will hope that her husband does not come home
at all.
Knowing this, Orlo and Leini savor the
bench.
On the other side of Light Street
stands the Southern Hotel, a landmark to a lifetime of indecision and
cowardice. Back when orchestras played jazz on the hotel roof, Leini begged
Orlo to take her there to dance, to “go and keep going.”
First he hesitated and then he refused
and to this day, staring up at the hotel cornice with a crust of bread in his throat, Orlo is not sure why. While
he hung on the fence, the Depression descended, followed by war and with it,
the death of Leini’s boy and then this and then that.
Instead of slogging through it
side-by-side, they met in secret to cook for each other, lie down and pretend.
They believe that this is the sacrament which has allowed their intimacies to
survive.
The front door of the hotel spins with
messengers and delivery boys arriving with dry cleaning and bouquets. Four men
in white aprons carry cakes in the shape of numbers above their heads: 1
followed by 9 followed by 6 followed by 4.
“It was bad this morning.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“You know he doesn’t touch me anymore.”
“So what happened?”
“He was going out to wait for a ship.”
“Yeah?”
“Passed by the stove on the way out.
Looked in the pot.”
“And?”
“And he didn’t like what he saw.”
“.
. . and when the steam cleared . . .”
What
George saw was awful.
The kitchen had been warm on the last
morning of December, heavy with steam from the simmering pot with a scent of
garlic and clove creeping along the walls.
It must stew a long time and stews
best on the back burner.
Passing by the white enamel stove, the
cuckold lifted the lid and put his face near the hot water. When the steam
cleared . . .
“Crock of shit,” says George, drinking
the day away in the Lorraine Tavern, the bar below the seamen’s union hall on
Gay Street, not a half-mile from the bench where his wife sits with her
American.
He saw the head of a pig - the meat
still tight to the skull - submerged in a large pot, the frothing water level
with its pink snout and the hog’s eyes glazed a blind and milky blue.
“Head cheese,” says the barkeep. “Good
eating. I thought you Greeks was on that lamb.”
[Back in the neighborhood, other
families would greet the New Year with roasted chicken, a treat in the days before
poultry came from the supermarket.
Orlo
and Leini made use of every part of the pig but the squeal and tried to coax
good luck from an unblemished calender on the logic that a chicken scratches
backward, but swine pushes on.]
“Goddamn crock of shit,” says George,
shots of vodka chasing the unkept promises Leini’s guardians had made to him if
he married the girl who’d been caught holding hands with the junkman. If he did
so quickly.
How long had the pig been in his face?
Longer than George can remember and
today he can’t remember anything but a pink snout; pale, sunken eyes and the
gun in his hand.
“George!” barks the bartender.
Now the gun is on the bar and everyone leaves. George demands another
drink.
“Look pal,” says the barkeep. “A ship’s
tying up on Pratt Street in a couple hours. Ain’t nobody gonna take a job on
New Year’s Eve. Why don’t you go upstairs and throw in for it.?”
“Why don’t you mind your business,”
says George, bringing the barrel to his left eye and blowing a hole through the
back of his head the size of a half dollar.
- o -
Fromage de la tete de pora . . .
- o -
The sun is down and Orlo takes Leini’s
hand, asks if he’d ever told her how his father died.
They
have known each other since the Jazz Age; a long string of delicacies and
desire from the moment the teenage girl served the wandering junkman a bowl of
pig feet in her guardians’ lunch room down at the end of Clinton Street.
And all these years later, like a
tongue seeking out every nugget of cartlidge in a hog maw, they are still
sifting the story.
“He was all ‘et up with cancer,” says
Orlo. “They kept telling me to go outside and play. Go outside and play. Jesus
Christ, I was nine years old. He was crying for his mother and saw his dead
brother sitting on the window sill.”
When Leini was nine, her parents
shipped her to family friends in Baltimore with every intention of following -
just as Orlo had had every intention of making a better life for her someday -
exchanging the smartest girl on the island of Samos for 14 Singer sewing
machines.
All
Leini knows about the deaths of her parents arrived in envelopes bordered in
black, first one and then another.
A bus stops in front of the bench. No
one gets on and no one gets off, the doors hanging open as Leini sees herself
back on the altar, saying yes before a church full of Greeks and meet me later
to the American.
“I’ll do this,” she’d told herself,
straining under the weight of an Orthodox wedding crown, her mother’s heart
beating in her ears. “I’ll do what they want and God will give me a life I can
bear.”
The bus driver tries to close the
doors but they’re stuck. Cursing, he tries to force it and a hinge snaps,
sending a chill up inside the cuffs of Leini’s sleeves.
“Go ahead,” says Orlo. “It’s going
your way.”
The bus roars off with the doors open,
the chill working its way around Leini’s collar bone to the base of her skull,
guilt shooting up behind her eyes.
Guilty with explanation.
- o -
Orlo watches Leini hurry away from the
bench toward the harbor but does not run after her.
Wild night is calling.
You can not play the games that Leini
has played all these years and be skittish. Prim, perhaps - the world loves a
mask almost as much as it loves lies - but not skittish.
Before a few moments ago, when a foul
wind blew out of the empty bus, Leini had never been more afraid than she’d
been in the hold of the boat that brought her to America, her mother’s voice in
the waves as the ship heaved into the Chesapeake Bay.
“It won’t be long . . .”
By midnight - soon, Eleini, very soon
- that fear will have been trumped in spades.
Leini moves down Light Street and
turns left at a string of coal barges, pausing to catch her breath, taking a
moment to watch a couple of tugboats work a freighter alongside the dock.
Pushing east against the wind, she
winces at the ache in her knees and prays that George will not go to sea before
she can offer some kind of apology.
On the edge of Little Italy, where
organ grinders once kept their animals in sheds called Monkey Row - the chimp
bones in the harbor silt, the hurdy-gurdys long-ago kindled in some
smokehound’s barrel - Leini turns for the rough warren of warehouses and alleys
where heavy springs are forged and thick rope is coiled to the rafters.
There are saloons on every corner and
pickled pig feet on the bar of every
saloon.
Leini is not a foolish girl and it is
odd for her to feel out-of-sorts like.
She has not known guilt - inexplicable guilt, pure and innocent - since
the son she’d conceived with George when she’d been a foolish girl was cut down
in the surf of Omaha Beach with the Maryland 29th.
The city is as cold as the desert and
Leini remembers how she used to navigate its odd turns with directions from a
man who could turn the brine of Baltimore into bouillabaisse.
“Walk to the end of Fell Street like you belong there
and wink at the watchman in the shack outside of Lord Mott’s packing house.
Turn left at the end of the pier and look for a blue dredge boat tied up
alongside a watermelon barge . . . I’ll be waiting . . .”
But it is not toward Orlo that Leini
struggles now.
Passing a narrow, arched passageway
that separates a pair of crumbling canning houses on Cabbage Alley - a sally
port leading to concrete yards of wild roses and dog shit - she catalogs all
the lies that had bought her time.
They rattled like coins in a bucket
and then came back in a swarm to sweep Leini into a tavern to drink in sympathy
with her husband.
Into
Zeppie’s, a stag bar where stevedores started each day with boiled eggs and
whiskey and a fresh pair of work gloves; a Polack gin mill that sold ham
sandwiches to dock workers who settled up their bar tabs with stolen hams.
There’s not much of a New Year’s Eve celebration here, just men
drinking on New Year’s Eve.
Leini
does not look like the women who pass through Zeppie’s; neither the wives who come hunting for their
husband’s pay nor the ones on whom their pay is spent.
She asks for a glass of beer and retreats to a table near a dirty
window in the corner, trying to count the good things about the man she married
to please others, at least the things that aren’ t bad.
The
bar is full of waterfront talk - sailing ships, docking ships, unloading ships
- and news of a freighter that just tied up at Pratt Street. Leini hopes that
George had signed on and wonders, should he pass by the window, if she might
run out and try to make him understand.
Every
now and then, you could talk to George.
“Hello.”
A man stands over Leini, clean and
well-groomed.
“May I?”
He sits across from her and Leini
shoves her hands in her coat. She knows Orlo and she knows George, but she does
not know men.
“I was just leaving.”
Tne man taps Leini’s glass: Strange
days, he says, my name is so-and-so, captain on the tugs.
When
he turns to the bar to get Leini a fresh drink, she’s out the door, remembering
not that she has betrayed George a million times but that she has betrayed Orlo
only once.
It’s getting late and she’d left food
on the stove.
She litters the streets with orange
peel and stale bread, something uneasy nipping the hem of her black dress,
dogging her ankles, pushing her home.
Some kind of stick in her back.
- o -
Denied
passage with the clouds on its way out of this world, the condemned vapor
coursed along the curbs.
From the Lorraine Tavern, where Orlo
saw a morgue wagon as he worried his own way home, the ghost hugged the mossy
seawall of the harbor rim, knocked a beer into the lap of a dapper tugboat captain who thought he’d
gotten lucky and seeped into the illegitmate tongue of a teenager putting her
family’s business in the street.
The teenager is shrewd for her years
and hard to look at, marred in some vague way on either side of her nose.
“It was the eyes that got me,” she
said, sneaking out to a party with a girl she thinks is her friend. “Like two
blobs of phlegm hocked onto the sidewalk.”
“Have you tasted it?”
“It makes me sick,” said Leini. “I
don’t know who they think they’re fooling, but they’re not fooling me.”
When the demon tries to visit the
graves of those it had loved as best it could - a stone honoring the valor of
the 29th Division, the tombs of a half-dozen others - it is turned back. But
easily reaches the appetites of a
couple it despised.
Climbing the clock tower of the
Salvage House, it slips a tiny monkey wrench into every timepiece on the wall,
a guarantee that the junkman and his slut will not be in sync tonight.
Springs pop, gears grind and Orlo sees
his old man in bed, a bag of bones crying for his mother.
Creeping away from the end of Clinton
Street, the ghost hovers over the black dirt where Leini’s guardians once ran a
successful lunch room - “It will be yours George,” they’d told him, laying out
the deal - and snakes through the exhaust pipes of buses parked in a yard at
Eastern Avenue and Ponca Street.
The diner burned down the day after George and Leini’s wedding
reception was held there, the young bride always acted like her mind was
somewhere else and the ghost slipped under the door of a kitchen where a low, blue
flame burned beneath the head of a pig.
- o -
Leini’s
apartment is on the second floor of a rowhouse across from the Ponca Street
transit yard, her front window looking down on row after row of pale green city
buses that have ferried her to many a meal.
The
No. 23 to Irvington, where Orlo had friends among the Xaverian missionaries who
ran the orphanage at Transfiguration High; the No. 10 to Sparrows Point
for picnics on the grounds of Fort Howard along the upper Bay and the No. 14
south to the strawberry patches of Anne Arundel County.
All behind Leini as she climbs the
stairs and turns the key.
The house is cold and what little
sympathy Leini had conjured for George on the street is gone, like her spiteful
daughter. No one is home.
Leini locks the door, turns on a small
light above the sink and opens two burners on the stove: one to boil water for
tea and one to rekindle the souse.
The “Magic Chef” electric clock - its
red and white dial built into the stove - hums toward midnight and Leini is
grateful that the world and its party are on outside. Unable to shake the
chill, she keeps her coat on, raises the thermostat, and picks up a Greek
newspaper to wait on the kettle.
George was on a binge and Little Leini
had defied her. She would see Orlo when she saw him - perhaps another bench,
maybe a bed in the Salvage House - and greet him with something more
substantial than an orange.
Once all of the flesh had simmered
free of the skull, Leini would strain the broth and set it aside for soup,
waiting until morning to run her fingers through the meat to pick out the
bones, chopping the ears as fine as grains of rice before mixing everything
with dark vinegar and cracked peppercorn.
She’d pack the devil into a curved
mold with a light sprinkle of paprika and slide it to the back of the fridge to
gel overnight.
Scanning the paper, Leini imagines the
treat sliced thin and pink on black rye, imagines the afternoon it will garnish
and finds a tribute to the new national hero of Greece, the poet Seferiades.
Freshly crowned as the first Nobel
laureate from Ellas, Seferiades
believes that poetry has its roots in human breath.
“Old
friend, what are you looking for? After many years abroad you come with images
you tended under foreign skies . . . It
is time to say our few words for tomorrow the soul sets sail . . .”
The kettle whistles and Leini gets up.
When the young, expatriate Seferiades was playing with other dreamers on the
were Rue de Fleurus, she’d already been slaughtered upon the altar of pride,
her hope in Orlo’s determination to make Baltimore was their Paris.
She is enveloped in the kitchen by a
humid perfume of clove and onion and sea salt and reaches through the mist for
a teacup delicate enough for the heat to seep into her palms.
Standing
before the darkened window with the cup between her hands, Leini considers the
face in the glass: Neither poet nor teacher or librarian, not much of anything
but a stubborn gourmand with a sandwich to spare and secrets leeching into the
cobblestones.
Leini can not deny it. She has never
tried to reverse the causes of her misery. She did not fight. She always took
the way around.
Perspiring, she starts to wriggle free of
her coat when regret crashes through the window and yanks her from the sleeves
like a shot from a sling. She hits the wall and hot tea runs down the plaster.
Guns
and fireworks erupt on the street. It is the moment between.
Dazed, Leini looks up at the scalded head
of a pig on invisible shoulders, a monster leering through empty eye sockets.
Struggling to her swollen knees, her back pulsing as though it is broke, she
crawls toward a wooden spoon on the stove.
The pig is up on her, dancing in circles
around her. Leini can not hear the New Year clang of pie plates on the street
and doesn’t see the pot that flies from the stove to crack her brow. Blood
leaks into her eyes and she falls in a puddle of gelatinous liquor.
“I’m frightened,” she cries. “Ya-Ya, I’m
frightened.”
The ghost laughs as Leini wets herself,
the broth beneath her legs ruined for soup.
Did someone fire a gun through the window?
Did a drunk on the street hurl a stew pot
at the moon?
Of all people, thinks Leini - bleeding,
confused, afraid - George would understand this. George saw things sometimes.
Swore that he did no matter how many people told him he was dreaming.
All of the heat and steam from the
kitchen is swept out of the broken window and the house is cold again, the pig
skull at the hem of Leini’s soaked black dress, it’s nose against the linoleum
and a hole the size of a half dollar behind a wilted ear.
Leini kicks the head away but the phantom
is gone; gone down the drain in the sink to swim through the bowels of the city
before settling down in the sleek bed of chrome and magnesium on the bottom of
the Patapsco.
Orlo and Leini are free - as they were
yesterday and the day before that - but they do not know it.
THE END