"Well he's busy with his medical practice and new wife," his mother replied.
What new wife? He beat her up. The police came and evicted him from the goddamn, luxury condo! "So he's coming for Passover?"
"They're coming," his mother corrected. "By the way, I spoke to Mrs. Callahan."
"Yes, I know."
"Such a sweet woman!" Mrs. Berman, who was repotting an aloe plant that had outgrown the decorative ceramic bowl, looked up. She sprinkled water over the vermiculite. "A bit intellectually limited but a perfectly decent sort."
"There are a few things you need to know before coming to Seder," Lenny cautioned. They were sitting in the living room of the Callahan house. Marcie had three older brothers and twin sisters so there were constant throngs of young people traipsing through the house at any given moment. Initially, the bedlam stood Lenny back on his heels, but over the years he had become inured; at a deeper level he may have actual begun to look forward to his regular visits.
Were the Callahans tacky? Yes. Were they loud and crass? Absolutely! Were they kind, boorish, fun loving, ignorant, gracious, ill-bred and welcoming? Well, yes again.
Just the other day, one of Marcie's older brothers, who played defensive end on the varsity football team, tiptoed up behind him. The muscle-bound goofball cuffed Lenny playfully on the side of the head with the flat of his hand. "There's pepperoni pizza in the kitchen, but you better hurry 'cause it's going fast." Lenny glanced warily at the husky teen. There was nothing mean-spirited in the physical act. It was just the way the Callahans were - direct to the point of raunchy inappropriateness.
"The Botox smile," Lenny counseled. "When you first arrive at Passover Seder, you will notice everyone smiling nonstop as though they just returned from the gates of heaven or a plastic surgeon."
"You're not even remotely funny," Marcie replied sourly.
"The reason for the euphoria," Lenny ignored the remark, "is they're all covering for my brother's marital problems. Nobody's supposed to know any of this so we 'pretend' everything's peachy keen."
"Will Joel's wife be there?"
"No, Miriam will not be coming for Passover and don't mention her name or draw attention to the fact that my brother is alone."
"And I thought my family was weird!" Marcie patted him sympathetically on the wrist. "What else?"
"My sister Elsie has a vindictive streak and will assault you with an endless barrage of catty remarks. It's what she exists for… her life calling. Don't take it personal."
"Anything else?" Marcie was beginning to look frazzled.
"Yes, one last thing: Goyim, non-Jews, are grossly inferior. It's their manifest destiny to never quite measure up. Essentially pagans and idol worshippers, they drink to excess, cheat on their spouses and their morals are so badly flawed as to be virtually non-existent."
"What about your brother and his foulmouthed, estranged wife?"
At the opposite end of the claustrophobically small house, Mrs. Callahan was hollering for someone to fetch a fresh roll of toilet paper. Out of the corner of his eye, Lenny caught sight of one of the twins bolting down the narrow hallway. "Oh no," he shot back flippantly, "that doesn't count. Joel and Miriam are the exception that makes the rule."
"Well then," Marcie replied, "I'll see you tomorrow night."
* * * * *
The following day at Brandenberg High School, Lenny cornered Marcie Callahan in the school cafeteria as she was sitting down for lunch. "My brother's bringing Miriam to Seder."
"But I thought -"
"Apparently the lovebirds reconciled and are trying to salvage their shitty marriage, so try to act normal."
"I don't get it."
"Nobody's supposed to know my brother beat his wife up or that they were living apart."
"I thought Jewish men didn't hit their wives."
"Just try to act normal, that's all."
"That's the second time you told me," Marcie observed soberly.
"Told you what?"
"To act normal."
Marcie arrived for the Passover Seder dressed in a blue frock and low, patent leather heels. Before the ceremony began, Mrs. Berman explained the symbolism of the various delicacies spread across the dining room table. "This blend of apples, nuts, wine and spices," she pointed to a small bowl, "is called charoset. It reminds us of the mortar the Jewish slaves mixed in their servitude." Next to the charoset was a dish of parsley to be dipped into salt water, representing the tears of the Jews exiled from their ancestral homeland. "When we dipped the greens in the water," Mrs. Berman explained, "we share in the bitterness and suffering of that Biblical time.
Baruch atah Adonai,
Ailochenu melech ha'olem…
Once Lenny's mother had finished explaining the symbolism, Mr. Berman recited the blessing for the wine. Twenty minutes later after reading the Four Questions, the ritual Passover meal was served. As appetizer, a glistening heap of gefilte fish was passed around along with a separate dish of horse radish. Mrs. Berman and her daughter-in-law shuttled the steaming platters of baked brisket, beans, potato and lokshen kugel from the kitchen.
"This is absolutely heavenly!" Marcie waved her fork over a spicy meat dish. "What are the flavorings?"
"Sweet potatoes," Mrs. Berman replied, "carrots, a dozen or so pitted prunes, raisins, brown sugar and cinnamon. The concoction is simmered in a cup of orange juice for the citrusy tartness. Some people substitute diced pears and apricots along with a large sweet onion."
Lenny surveyed the room. Mr. Berman, who drained several glasses of Manischewitz wine before the ceremony got under way was feeling no pain whatsoever. Joel looked constipated. Sitting to his left, Miriam exuded a glacial, haughtiness. Whatever festive joy she might have felt lost traction, degenerating in diffuse indifference. She was clearly attending the family gathering under protest. Acting like she was hopped up on amphetamines, Mrs. Berman talked nonstop. Elsie was just plain old Elsie.
Around eight-thirty, Lenny approached his mother sorting leftovers in the kitchen. "I'm walking Marcie home."
"Such a lovely girl! I'm so glad she came." Mrs. Berman seemed overwrought, almost manic with relief that there had been no unpleasantness. Nobody mentioned the maitre d's testicles, Joel's fisticuffs or Miriam's predilection for obscenity-laced temper tantrums.
"Are Joel and Miriam getting divorced?"
"Bite your tongue!" Mrs. Berman hissed. "Why would you suggest such absurdity?"
Lenny was dead tired. He felt like a bit player in an off-Broadway theater production after the final curtain had descended and the actors rushed off to their respective dressing rooms to shed costumes and makeup. "I'm gonna walk Marcie home," he repeated, ignoring the question.
"If there was some misunderstanding between your brother and his wife," his mother spoke a bit too quickly, running all the words together in a frenetic heap, "it's all in the past now and everything's back to normal."
Elsie lugged the last of the dirty dishes into the kitchen, setting them on the counter before drifting back into the dining room. "No it isn't," Lenny blurted.
Mrs. Berman eyed her son nervously. "It's getting late. I gotta take Marcie home."
When they were two blocks from the house, Lenny pulled up short. "I'm sorry about the Passover Seder."
"It's not your fault," Marcie noted. "Not everyone can have a perfect family like mine." She grabbed his face in both hands and kissed his mouth. "We're probably going to spend the rest of our lives together."
"Yes, that's fairly obvious," Lenny held her close. Somehow the endemic heartache he associated with his own cracked-egg-of-a-family, merged; it comingled and morphed into a sublime presentiment. "But we will need to create a new world order, a community of like-minded individuals."
Marcie paused a moment, considering the task at hand. "Something midway between Scout, Jem and Atticus Finch."
"With a smattering of Boo Radley thrown in for good measure." Lenny nuzzled her ch
eek with his lips.
"Yes, I totally forgot about Boo." Her arms snaked up behind Lenny's shoulders, holding on for dear life.
Back to Table of Contents
Failure to Launch
"What if you had to choose between two, patently unethical propositions?" Fred Linden posited in a slapdash, disorganized fashion.
The middle-aged man was sitting behind his desk in shirtsleeves, the paisley tie dangling askew at his throat. Short and broad - more muscular than flabby - a shock of unkempt sandy hair drifted haphazardly over his blue eyes. The fair skin tones were offset by ruddy cheeks and a fleshy nose. The general impression was that of a mischievous adolescent trapped in a man's body, Peter Pan masquerading as a middle-age, hospital administrator replete with designer shirt and thirty-dollar, silk tie.
Collin Abercrombie entered the office and hastily closed the door “How serious are the issues?"
"Enough to wreck a professional career."
The melodrama was vintage Fred Linden. You thought the meeting was to discuss case management issues - some eighty-year-old Alzheimer's patient complaining that the skinny-as-a-rail, home care aide stole her size 38, double-D bra - and Fred walloped you upside the head with some totally unrelated, incidental nonsense.
“I’m not following you.” Collin glanced over his shoulder. Yes, the door was shut, the muffled sounds in the hospital corridor dampened away to nil. "I'd need more specifics."
“An aide in the home care unit, Gwen Santos, hasn’t attended a single continuing education workshop all year.”
“I’m not surprised.” The home care worker was caring for an eighteen-year-old paraplegic woman injured in a car accident. Split shift seven days a week, Gwen ministered to the invalid, who had been discharged from a rehab facility eight months earlier and lived in handicapped housing. She cleaned the colostomy bag, bathed and dressed the cripple before transferring her to a motorized wheelchair. Early on, Collin visited the home to do the activities-of-daily-living assessment. In her late thirties, Gwen never called out sick. In the dead of winter with a foot of fresh-packed snow on the ground, the caregiver fishtailed down the ice-strewn, Route 95 interstate in her beat-up Subaru with bald tires and a blown muffler to bath and feed the paralyzed woman.
“If the department of health checks personnel folders, they could cite Gwen for non-compliance,” Collin noted. “Revoke her license.”
Fred pushed a messy clump of papers across the desk. “Which is why I forged her signature on all ten, CEU attendance sheets.”
Collin felt a cramping sensation in his stomach. When Fred Linden finally raised his eyes from the desk, the perennial jokester wasn't smiling anymore. "So which is the lesser of two evils?"
The lesser of two evils... A young girl with withered legs, spastic bladder and no control whatsoever over the lower portion of her body forfeits a devoted caregiver, because the state, in its bureaucratic wisdom, mandates that Gwen Santos sit in a classroom learning what she already knew from ten years earlier!
Collin rubbed his chin and made a disagreeable face. The latest DOH inspector, Rita Fogelman, was an anal-compulsive brute, who during a recent visit peppered the department with a fistful of frivolous discrepancies. If Ms. Fogelman had stumbled across Gwen Santos’ file during the previous audit, she would have discovered the lack of continuing education credits. The aide would have been sanctioned and promptly stripped of her license. In the collateral damage the paraplegic teenager would have lost the only reliable helpmate she ever knew. But that troubling detail would never factor into the equation.
"I duplicated the signature from Gwen’s employment application… forged signatures on all ten attendance sheets." Fred thumped the topmost form with a stubby forefinger. “Judging by the old-fashion, cursive ‘r’s and bulky 'G's, I’m guessing Gwen attended a parochial school run by ninety-year-old nuns in black habits and wimples.”
Gathering up the papers, he tossed them in a manila folder alongside an ICD10 coding manual as thick as a Bible. The cumbersome volume was heavy enough to use as a doorstop. "But that's not really why I called you here." He pointed at a laptop computer lying on a workstation near the window. "There's a database program I'd like you to look at."
Still frazzled by the earlier revelation, Collin sat down at the workstation and reached for the mouse. "Where's the cursor?"
"Professional File System is a forty-year-old database that predates the mouse." Fred replied, "It doesn't even know what a Window’s operating system is much less a desktop icon."
For the second time in less than five minutes Fred Linden rendered the younger man mildly disoriented. Collin pulled his hand away from the keyboard and studied the scruffy laptop. “This isn’t your regular computer.”
“I got it out of mothballs from hospital storage. The program won’t function on any software program newer than Windows XP
“What about USB ports?”
There aren’t any.”
“So how -”
“Floppy disc,” Fred interjected, anticipating Collin’s question.
"How do I navigate the main menu?"
"Up and down arrows in conjunction with the Enter key."
Collin depressed the down arrow and the screen came alive. Tapping lightly on the Enter key, the prehistoric program navigated to a crude search menu with four, separate options.
"The program resembles a hobbled horse with blinders,” Fred noted. “It limps along unable to take in much of anything except what's directly within its restricted frame of vision. But that’s the beauty of it. The program does next to nothing, but it does it exceedingly well."
"With all the sophisticated database applications on the market,” Collin protested, “why use such a limited program?"
"We need it exclusively for one application: updating client invoices."
"What about Microsoft XL or one of the hospital spreadsheet programs?"
As the administrator explained the dilemma, he had already sampled a dozen similar programs, each of which contained a fatal flaw; either they couldn't perform multiple field searches or the complex, design templates resisted modification. "What we have here is an absurdly obsolete computer program that does exactly what we need, quicker and more efficiently than anything else on the market."
Collin shrugged. "So what's the problem?"
"Most college professionals would balk at such a shabby product." Fred's massive face dissolved in a conspiratorial smirk. "That's where you come in. I want you to learn PFS and show one or two enlightened souls in your department how this stone-age, relic works. That way, if I'm out sick or away on conference, there's no break in continuity."
The older man rose and reached for his jacket. "Have you had coffee?" Collin shook his head. "Let’s grab something, and over lattes I'll review the particulars."
* * * * *
A mile from the hospital they passed the town library and a Goodyear tire shop. A few minutes later on the left-hand side of the road a Tim Horton's with a parking lot full of customers loomed into view, but Fred continued along at a moderate clip. When they reached Brandenburg center, Fred swerved into Ryan's Diner. "Changed my mind," he blurted. "Forget coffee. I need breakfast… a full meal."
Once inside, the older man chose a booth near the back of the restaurant. They ordered breakfast specials, and the waitress, a plump brunette with a pear-shaped torso, hurried off to fetch drinks. When the meal arrived, Fred reached across the table and thumped Collin playfully on the forearm. "How's your love life?"
"Temporarily on hold."
"I thought you were dating that freckle-faced X-ray technician?"
"Only briefly. Didn't work out," he muttered noncommittally.
"Ever think about settling down?"
As with everything else, the question materialized out of nowhere. "Without a soul mate, it's all wishful thinking."
Fred waved a fist vaguely in the direction of the main counter. "How about that one over there? Could you pictu
re yourself married to that cute blonde?"
Fifty feet away, a waitress dressed in a white uniform leaned against the Formica counter. Slouched at an angle, she peered out the window with a sultry expression, her frizzy hair tied back in a pig tail that petered out about the nape of the neck.
"She's probably already got a husband."
"That doesn't answer my question."
The smell of maple syrup and fresh-perked coffee drifted from the next booth where an elderly Hispanic was demolishing a stack of blueberry pancakes. Collin gazed intently at the pale-skinned woman a second time. "Despite the fact that I don't even know her, I could fantasize all sorts of intriguing possibilities."
Fred took a final swig of coffee and rose to his feet. "Don't go anywhere."
Lumbering to the counter, he tapped the waitress on the shoulder and began a rather vigorous monologue. Nonplussed, the girl seemed to be only half listening. Fred Linden gestured with both hands as he flicked his eyes in the direction of the booth where Collin was sitting, and the blonde gave him a perfunctory once over before turning away. After a series of animated exchanges, Fred returned to the booth.
"Saturday night… a dinner date followed by movie of her choosing." He paid the bill, placing the tip separately to one side. "Dress to impress and make formal dinner reservations so you're not kept waiting to be seated."
Collin gawked again at the blonde. She was still rooted in the same place, peering out the window with a look of haughty indifference. "That waitress agreed to go out with me on your recommendation?"
By way of response, Fred Linden flashed his goofball, little-boy smile. "I don't even know the woman's name, where she lives or telephone number," Collin protested.
"No matter," Fred rose to his feet and was already half way to the door. "Her father can supply you with the miscellaneous information."
* * * * *
Fred Linden and his daughter, Alison, were not on the coziest term, which is why when they entered the diner the father purposely chose a booth away from the front. "Ali was valedictorian of her senior class," Fred boasted on the drive back from Ryan's Diner. "She studied at Brandeis on full academic scholarship… got her degree two years ago."