I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (2 page)

My first official day on the job, he showed me how to spray the books with a special solution that killed dust mites, and how to write overdue notices and perform other clerical tasks. From the get-go I approached this employment with the utmost seriousness. I thought of studying library science. I saw myself in that world. I even entertained the possibility that Pinnie Oler's position might someday be mine. I had no earthly notion that one day bookmobiles would be extinct. I had always seen them on the streets.

Let's say you were standing next to the steering wheel and looking toward the back of the bookmobile. Filling the top three shelves on the right side was the Science category: books about zoology, astronomy, geology, medicine. There were three or four books about the Canadian Arctic. The bottom two shelves below Science were reserved for Government/Social Science. This section had a lot of books about Abraham Lincoln. Along the left side were shelves containing Fiction and Poetry (Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, John Keats, Langston Hughes), and directly below was the shelf of Children's Books. Art was on a shelf across the back. The five slide-out wooden drawers of the card catalogue were in the back left-hand corner. On top of the drawers was a slotted box: Book Requests. At the end of my workday I'd deliver the requests to Pinnie Oler, who would submit them to the central branch library. One time I found a condom in the request box, another time a pornographic postcard bent in half, another time a handwritten note:
You will be
killed for letting kikes and niggers touch our books.
I didn't show these to my boss. More typically, at day's end there would simply be four or five requests for this or that title.

 

My mother worked in what is now known as child care. She supervised at least a dozen young children every day at the Orthodox synagogue downtown. This meant my two younger brothers had to be at “summer camp” all day. We couldn't afford to pay the yearly dues at the synagogue, and no special dispensation was offered even though my mother worked there. Instead we belonged to what she referred to as the more “welcoming” Temple Emanuel, a Reform synagogue that provided her a more familiar if not nostalgic theology, insofar as the Belfaire Jewish Orphan Home had not followed strictly Orthodox practices.

All through my elementary and high school years, holiday events and myriad other occasions at Temple Emanuel comprised my mother's entire social life. We never had anyone over for dinner, except once in a blue moon my aunt Shirley, my mother's sister. Shirley, an officer of the temple's Sisterhood, often sat at the rabbi's table at Passover, and lorded this over my mother. (“Estella likes to fraternize with the
shvartzehs,
” meaning the black kitchen help—which was true.) Shirley had always struck me as a snob and a nag. I never did figure out where her impressive talent for condescension came from; after all, she was raised in the Belfaire Jewish Orphan Home, too. One of my aunt's primary complaints was that my mother never had anyone else over for dinner. It is possible she might've worried that my mother was isolated. More plausibly, my aunt was embarrassed by my mother's frumpy housedresses, her menial job, her introverted nature, and her absent husband—“for all intents and purposes my sister's a widow”—and she rarely invited my mother to dinner at her house, either. There it was. But by week's end my mother was simply exhausted. And she said, “I like weekends to myself.”

 

Twice that summer my older brother, Michael, stole a car. Oddly, after each theft he waited out the police in an empty pew of Temple Emanuel or at the library table playing cards with the temple's janitor and groundskeeper. Both times, Rabbi Esrig asked what he was doing there in the middle of the day, and apparently my brother gave him an honest answer, along the lines of, “I stole a car and drove it here. It's in the parking lot.” The first time, when the car—a 1958 Edsel, for God's sake, a hideously designed vehicle—was returned to its rightful owner on Union Street, the victim agreed not to press charges if my brother painted his one-story house, which my brother did, though it took him about two months. The second time, Paris dipped into her “inheritance” to bail my brother out of jail. That second victim pressed charges.

In the end Michael served six months probation, during which he was assigned the task of painting the center lines on highways with a “cleanup crew” of other parolees. The thing was, in both instances Michael had only needed transportation to the temple. Once he'd arrived there he seemed to have no further use for the stolen car. I'm not suggesting there was anything rational in any of this. Paris would've loaned him her car at the drop of a hat. She had a two-year-old black Pontiac four-door. She'd made all her payments. That was a situation heretofore unknown to me. In my house, it felt as if my mother was going to be making car payments for a hundred years.

Anyway, in late June Pinnie Oler said to me, “You always look fairly glum when you get to work. I figure you've got a lot going on at home. I'm not going to ask. Just consider this library your daytime address. But I can't let you sleep in here. I get the feeling you're about to ask to. But go ahead and consider this old bus like a café in Paris—nobody's gonna kick you out. I've never been to Paris, but I heard that's true.”

Engine-wise, the bookmobile had a lot of problems: stalled out at a corner, blue hood raised, radiator geysering steam, grind of metal and friction smell, fan belt broken, oil spilling out, things like that. “Just bus problems,” Pinnie Oler would call them, shrugging philosophically. Looking back, the word that I think accurately describes him is
poised.
He'd walk right up to a house, knock on the door, and when someone appeared, he'd point to the bookmobile and ask to use the telephone, and far more often than not it worked out. He would call his wife, Martha, who was a bus mechanic for the Grand Rapids school system. It must've been rare to have a woman mechanic back then. Maybe it still is. Martha would come to the rescue. She drove a green pickup truck with built-in toolboxes.

To my mind, Martha Oler was an absolutely beautiful woman. I thought she looked savvy and confident. During my months as a bookmobile assistant, she had to be called out on at least half a dozen occasions. Each time, she'd climb down from the cab of her truck, walk over to her husband, lean him against the broken-down bookmobile, and in her smudged mechanic's smock kiss him as deeply and passionately as people kissing in any movie I'd seen up to that point—right out in the open, daylight audience or no. I saw a lot through the bookmobile window. Then she'd return to the truck, get her tools, and attend to the bus problem. She was slightly taller than Pinnie, had dark red hair and a quick, lip-biting smile, and always leaned inside the bookmobile to say, “Hey, sport, fancy seeing you here!” That was her little joke, me being a fixture like I was.

The bookmobile made eight official stops per day. Hillcrest Elementary, the public swimming pool, Mills Retirement Village, Blodgett Memorial Hospital, across from Dykstra's Apothecary, Mulick Park Elementary School, Union High School, and the YMCA. But in the summer of 1964, Pinnie Oler also made, a minimum of twice a week, what he called an unscheduled stop. This was in front of his own house, at 58 Wycliffe Drive NE. The first time he made this unscheduled stop, he switched off the ignition and said, “There's a park nearby. Take a Nehi orange or keep filling out overdue notices, whatever you want. Me and Martha are trying to make a baby.” He turned the roundabout handle to open the door, stepped out onto the street, went to the front of the bookmobile, and propped open the hood so it looked like the bus had broken down. “For appearance' sake,” he said. His wasn't a front door he had to knock on. Two Nehi orange sodas later—add to that sitting in the park reading a book about adventures in the far north of Canada, dangling my feet in a pond that was home to two aggressive swans to watch out for, and nodding off under an oak for a quick nap on a sultry afternoon—I went back to the bookmobile. There I found Pinnie Oler sitting in the driver's seat, the motor idling. Martha was browsing the Science section. “Martha's got the afternoon off,” he said. “She's going to get some reading in.”

 

It was about this time that I started to write letters to other people's fathers. I wrote a lot of these letters in the bookmobile during lulls. I wrote them on the backs of overdue notices, upward of ten notices per letter.

First I made a list of fathers. All told, there were twenty-two. I wrote to Jerry Boscher's father, Marcia Eldersveld's, Paul Bigelow's, Shawnay Smith's, Gary van Eerden's, Becky Marcellus's, Jay Osherow's, Stephen Peck's, Tommy Sturdevant's, Esme Carlyle's father (he was an elementary school principal), Ellen Hake's, Brian Siplon's, Sara Schoen's, Genevieve T. Park's, Eric Klein's, Eileen Heuvelhorst's, Darlene Diane Johnson's, Bobby Fodor's, Mandes Iver Garnes's, Yvonne Muller's, Nancy Wong's, and Ira and Jay Dembinksky's father.

I never sent a single letter; in that sense, my epistolary life was willfully unrequited. But I didn't throw them away, either. Plus, I made carbon copies. “A letter never sent is a kind of purgatory,” writes Chekhov. What made me write all those letters? The basic desire to speak to
any
father with a sense of intimacy, I suppose. Being able to organize emotions, the direct address, the implorations and requests, the letting off of steam, the indictments, the complaints, the attempt to feel things deeply. And since I was composing these letters on pieces of paper with the words
Overdue Notice
at the top, they must've been written with an abiding sense of urgency, not to mention some notion of imposing a penalty. No single example can fully represent this veritable fugue state of letter writing. But here's one written to Mandez Garnes's father, whose first name was Jacob.

 

Dear Mr. Garnes,

You probably remember that I'm friends with your son Mandez and that I've been at your house. You probably remember that at your barbeque Mandez and I took our chicken and potato salad over by the guest house. Mandez told me the guest house was going to become his own private room. It was going to be his birthday present when he turned sixteen. I work in the bookmobile and have some time to think about important things. One of these things is that last week you might remember seeing me in front of the Majestic Theatre. I wasn't short on money for a ticket. I didn't need to ask you for money because I work in the bookmobile, as I said. I don't remember a lot of things my own father said but he called that kind of movie a shoot 'em up. Why I'm writing this letter is for the following reason. I want to tell you that I thought it was wrong of you to embarrass Mandez when he found out he was short of ticket money himself. You said it builds character to earn your own money and why should you pay for Mandez, he's already fifteen. My own father embarrasses me every day by not being around. Mandez is lucky you're around but you didn't have any cause to embarrass Mandez that way, I think. You could just as easily of given him the ticket money and talked to him father son in private later on. That's all of it. By the way something you should know is that Mandez is good at earning money. For instance there's nobody better than your son at finding money people dropped under the bleachers at Ottawa Hills stadium, during football games. Maybe you didn't know that every Saturday and Sunday morning Mandez walks around under the bleachers and finds money like that. Were you ever that smart when you were 15? Maybe you should give that some thought. I don't think Mandez enjoyed the movie very much because of all of what you did.

With sincerity,

 

I stopped writing these letters when school started again, but by then my archive contained two hundred, give or take. I'd purchased two manila envelopes, placed the originals in one, the carbons in another. I stuffed both in the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet in the basement of our house, a drawer otherwise crammed with Belfaire Jewish Orphan Home newsletters from the 1930s.

 

On July 5—I remember the date because I watched Peter Dykstra take down from the apothecary window an American flag he'd displayed on Independence Day—Robert Boxer brought his grandmother to the bookmobile. She had just been in the apothecary with my father, her grandson Robert, and her son-in-law Peter Dykstra. I saw my father step outside, walk down the street, and stand by the bus stop about a block away. Mrs. Boxer was quite large, about sixty-five years of age, I'd guess, and confined to a wheelchair, so Robert had to carry her up the three steps. He was strong, but it definitely took some effort. At the landing, she said, “Now, see, Robert, aren't you glad I don't eat those Snickers bars like I used to?” Robert started laughing so hard he almost dropped his grandmother, but he kept his balance, navigated to a bench, and set his grandmother down on it. He sat next to her, catching his breath. “My grandmother's doing deliveries with me today,” Robert said to me and Pinnie Oler.

“I'm keeping on my church hat,” she said. “It's good for these hot sunny days and I am easily flushed. And if my blood heats up too much, well, my grandson Robert can tell you, I have been known to faint.”

“You're strong as a horse, Grandma,” Robert said. “I don't know why you present yourself this way all the time. I've never seen you faint.”

“Heat stroke, it's called,” Mrs. Boxer said. “And the only reason, Robert, you have not seen me faint from it is because you never happen to be there.”

“My loving pharmacist father says you're generally in very good health,” Robert said.

“My own mother lived to be one hundred and two,” she said.

“I've heard that rumor,” Robert said. “I've heard that rumor a thousand times.”