Meyer and Silla

A short story by Peter Orner


My great-aunt Silla used to slip fifty-dollar bills into the front shirt-pocket of my brother’s Cub Scout uniform. Then she’d place one of her still long, still exquisite fingers delicately on her upper lip to let him know that he didn’t have to tell her sister, that her little gift of General Grant could stay a secret between the two of them. And even after Uncle Meyer went bankrupt and they were living in Fanny’s place on Wampanoag Street, I could see Aunt Silla doing that with the fifties. She walked around Aunt Fanny’s cramped stucco house the same way she did that big, beautiful, marble-floored place way up the top of President Avenue. She strutted through rooms filled with cheap furniture as if chandeliers lined the ceiling. The fact that Meyer had gone pauper didn’t change her. Or the paintings she hung on her walls, the paintings she’d hid for months in my grandmother’s attic. We all knew that the paintings were all they had left, the only thing of value not seized by the gang of bankers and creditors who swarmed the house as soon as everything went to hell, flashing their business cards and bearing reams of paper, as if anybody needed proof that their latest fresh kill was really insolvent.

But to Silla, the paintings, one of which she claimed was an early Chagall, represented who she was, not who she once was. True, now they hung on the flaky yellow walls of Aunt Fanny’s living room. They no longer adorned a grand front hall like the one she used to hustle guests through with a flurry of wild waving, saying, “Darlings, don’t dawdle—come in!” Yet even at Fanny’s, where the change in circumstances could not have been more stark, Silla’s eyes gave nothing away. Not regret, never anger.

In his way, Meyer had the same take on things. His spectacular plunge from the upper stratosphere of Fall River society didn’t stop him from hectoring anyone who came near him and his crooked pipe about the glories of high finance. He’d call Uncle Morris a buffoon for the way he ran his cookie business, even though it was known throughout southeastern Massachusetts and the whole state of Rhode Island (the Providence Journal had run the story) that Meyer’s sham investment scheme, his Ponzi game, his robbing Peter to pay Paul, as my mother put it years later, had not only ruined him, but nearly took the rest of the family—and much of Jewish Fall River—down as well. My grandfather, Uncle Morris, Cousin Lenny—all of them lost tens of thousands. They say no one in my extended family came out unscathed when it came time to do the accounting, except, as my grandmother used to mutter under her breath, Cousin Ruthie Lutz’s husband, Stanley, because Stanley, the lousy footdragger, never had an honest dime to lose to begin with.

Meyer and Silla were our family’s famous once-hads. Meyer was the man who turned the measly curtain factory his father left him into a million-dollar corporation. So what if it was all a paper swindle? You got measured by what you owned, and he and Silla had a condo on West 39th and a beach house on Cape Cod near Jackie O.’s childhood place in Truro. Meyer had season tickets to Harvard football. He didn’t go to Harvard. “But what’s it matter,” he used to sing, dressed hat to toe in crimson, “if Harvard’s not my alma mater.” When anybody asked what he did, he’d say, “I’m in philanthropy.” And he had Silla, the most breathstealing Jewish girl to ever grace the banks of the Taunton River. They had it all, so it’s no wonder people shoveled their money at Meyer. Everyone, even my never stylish, always frumpled grandparents, wanted a piece of that action. People wanted to know the things that Meyer and Silla knew, talk about what they talked about, travel to the places they traveled: Saint-Tropez, Copenhagen, Nairobi. And when it was all over, Meyer and Silla held tight their mystique by tossing an enormous costume ball in the waning days before foreclosure. If we’re going to fall, Silla must have told Meyer, let’s do it grandly, loudly, with abandon, my puckery darling. Meyer went as a conquistador; Silla as Golda Meir.

I came along a lot later. Long after Meyer and Silla’s glory days had been reduced to stacks of photographs stuffed in envelopes and pushed to the back of lower desk drawers. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, our family’s standard of living had long since plummeted, and the Cape houses were a sun-glared, overexposed memory. There were other storied family catastrophes: The state of Massachusetts built a highway smack through my grandfather’s furniture store; Uncle Morris’s cookie factory went belly-up because of the price of sugar, something about a coup d’état in the Dominican Republic. In the late seventies, my humbled relatives summered in the Fall River swelt.

But even as a nine-year-old so shy I only stared at the stains in Aunt Fanny’s carpet and grunted replies from beneath an old fedora of my father’s that I wore religiously from ages seven to ten, I could see there was something different about this set of aunt and uncle. They did not dote like the others. They did not yank us close and squeeze us and wonder out loud if we were getting enough protein in Illinois. No, when we visited Aunt Silla and Uncle Meyer at Aunt Fanny’s, we were treated more like visiting dignitaries, midget princes from the far-off Midwest.

On a visit to Fall River in the fall of 1976, Silla greeted us, formally, in front of Fanny’s squeaky screen door. “Welcome, little nephews,” she said. “I’ve made pâté.” We sat down in the front room, and Aunt Silla brought us tea. It was the first time I’d ever used a saucer. Then she conversed with us. The other aunts did not talk so much as force-feed, the sound of their girdles chafing as they hustled around with heaping plates of brownies. Aunt Silla crossed her legs and asked what we thought of Freud. She gently lectured us about the importance of going to museums and appreciating artists.

After our time with Silla, we were released to Meyer, who was waiting in the den with his pipe. We took turns kissing his fuzzy face. Then he clapped his gnarled hands and started in. “Who is this bucktooth?” He smacked his fat lips and released smoke in my brother’s face. “Since when do we go around electing peanut farmers as president of the United States?”

My brother’s most formative moments were spent watching the Watergate hearings on our kitchen television. He’d been preparing himself for weeks to talk political shop with Uncle Meyer. “Jimmy Carter is a businessman,” my brother said. “He directed a major agricultural concern. He served his country on a nuclear submarine. He’s governor of the thirty-first-largest state. He knows what he’s doing, frankly—injecting a little decency into our morally bankrupt political culture.”

At the word “bankrupt,” Meyer’s little head nearly shot off his neck. “God help this child! A ten-year-old Communist! Who tells you such things? That pixy in the big chair! While General Motors moves Detroit to Mexico, and the Russians overrun Scandinavia!”

“I’m fourteen,” my brother said.

“All the more reason you shouldn’t be hoodwinked by Cossack dogs!”

At this, Silla scurried into the den. “Shush, Meyer, shush.” She reined him in, reminded him that we were only kids, that to us the world was still a garden, still capable of healing, of peace, my love, peace. And it worked. Silla calmed him. Even though he was a shriveling old man—he got smaller every time we visited—he still worshipped her with a fever. Silla was his prize. They’d ripped it all away. His dignity. His office on the third floor of the Herald Building. Every cent he ever had, all the houses. His chairmanship of the Fall River Chamber of Commerce, his lifetime community-service medal, his tickets to the Harvard-Yale game. They’d even threatened jail time. But Meyer Shudofsky was still married to Silla Fineman, and you could see that in his eyes when she came to rescue my brother.

Silla, with her long blue-gray hair pulled tightly around her head, poured another round of tea into our delicate cups. My grandmother, who had been hovering in the kitchen, scouring pans and reorganizing drawers, emerged and said under her breath, “Silla, how can you serve children tea in cups like that?”

“Our mother’s service,” Silla said. “Molly’s. She would have wanted the cherubs to know these dishes.” My grandmother looked at Silla, and for a moment the two of them remembered their mother, who must have been something to have given birth to all four Fineman girls. Silla was the oldest, the only one born in Russia; my grandmother was the youngest. Their mother died soon after my grandmother was born.

Meyer and Silla often apologized to my brother and me for not being rich anymore. Silla would say things like, “Oh, boys, if things hadn’t gone to the absolute dogs, we’d all be on the Cape right now, and you two would be splashing in the bay like a couple of little John-Johns.” So, to compensate for going broke too soon, Meyer and Silla would take my brother and me to Horseneck Beach. I remember one time when we were pulling into the parking lot on one of those hot, gusty days, the waves exploding onto the shore, and Silla turned to Meyer and said, “Oh, Jean-Luc. You’re always taking me places. Today—la Riviera.” Later, when one of my cousins asked us what beach we’d gone to, my brother said gravely, with a twitch of his head, that we’d gone with Uncle Meyer to the coast of France, thank you.

Years later, when I was a freshman in high school and my brother was away at college, I remember standing in the kitchen on Wampanoag Street, talking to Silla about books. She thought it scandalous that I hadn’t read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. I wasn’t irredeemable, she said, but getting there. Meyer had been hovering around, ignoring us. Talk of anything other than politics or business irritated him; he was lonely for my brother. I watched him stoop to pick something up off the kitchen floor. Then he tickled Silla’s ankle with a couple of stubby, unsteady fingers. She reached down—and without taking her eyes off me—swatted his hand. Meyer muttered and withdrew like a shooed-away crab. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I could have sworn it was a crawly.”

They couldn’t carry on like that forever, and Meyer, who was a few years older, eventually got very sick. No one in my family ever says what anyone is sick of—so Meyer was simply sick. But because his condition, whatever it was, had become too serious for Silla to take care of, they had to move him to the Jewish Home for the Aged, over on East Warren. Meyer never did get better; yet he didn’t die right away, either. He lingered for years. My grandmother conspired to keep all family medical information sealed, but once I overheard her talking about him. The phone cord was stretched across the hall and ran under the bathroom door. Of course she was talking to Dora Greenblatt, her faithful gossip lieutenant and co–vice president of Fall River Hadassah. When it came to my grandmother, she was either in a room with Dora Greenblatt or on the phone with her. Dora was a tiny woman who chain-smoked, but she wasn’t hard of hearing. Even so, my grandmother was practically shouting. “He just gets worse and worse. He doesn’t even cry for his pipe anymore.”

Then Silla got sick, too. She fell down on an icy sidewalk in the parking lot outside Gus’s Luncheonette. They ran tests. This was in the winter of 1984. Again, nobody talked, but we knew it was bad. It became more than a hip replacement. This triggered the last humiliation. My grandmother couldn’t get Silla a bed in the Jewish Home even though Meyer’s money had helped build the place in the salad days. That “Shudofsky” was chiseled above the door didn’t matter a lick to anybody now. The waiting list was a hundred names long. My grandmother was stomping around, shouting, “Silla Shudofsky on a waiting list!” Dora Greenblatt and I were sitting at the kitchen table with the Fall River phonebook open to the white pages. My grandmother stopped and seized the kitchen wall phone. I watched her trembling hand holding the receiver, her finger in the rotary, poised to circle. She rammed the phone down. “Who’s left to call?” she asked. “Nobody with any clout in this town has spoken to us in twenty years. If he didn’t steal from the father, he stole from the son.”

“What about Ira Pinkoff?” Dora said. “He’s at Alpine 6-0993.”

My grandmother stood before us. Even in sweats, she was square-shouldered, bulky, imposing. My grandfather used to call her his personal Il Duce. “May we never sink so low,” she said, “that we have to call Ira Pinkoff for anything.” Then she announced there was no alternative for Silla but the state home across the river in Somerset. When Dora gasped, my grandmother said, “Keep your blouse on, Dora Greenblatt. It’s just across the Braga Bridge.”

My brother told me this last part as we stood blowing into our hands at Silla’s graveside service three Februarys ago. My grandmother was dead; Silla had somehow outlived her. He heard this from Dora Greenblatt. Even now, if you want any family secrets, you have to first call Dora. She told him the story on the sidewalk in front of Temple Beth El. Dora said that a week before Meyer’s death, a year and a half before Silla’s, two of my Rhode Island cousins, Jacob and Mimi, arranged for Meyer and Silla to say good-bye. At this point, Meyer was blind and mostly slept all day, but Jacob smuggled him into a car—this was all against strict doctor’s orders, so it had to be done undercover—and drove him to a shopping center between the two nursing homes. Mimi drove Aunt Silla, who by then had lost nearly half her body weight. Meyer and Silla hadn’t seen each other in two years. The family had been waiting for one or the other to die quietly like the doctors had promised, but neither had cooperated. He was ninety-five. She was ninety-two. The two cars pulled up, and there they were, Meyer and Silla, in the parking lot, in front of the Al Mac’s. Silla was able to stand up and walk slowly over to Meyer, who was slumped in the passenger seat. Jacob opened the door, but Meyer waved him away. He knew she was close and tried to pull himself out of the seat, but couldn’t; so Silla leaned into the car, and Meyer dropped his head on her shoulder. Then Silla whispered something to him. Dora Greenblatt said neither Jacob nor Mimi heard what she said. Maybe she told him she’d meet him wherever he was going and not to worry, because they’d be flush when they got there. Meet me by the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo, at Beaumont’s. I’ll be the one in the fox coat and white heels. The two of them remained hunched together until my cousins finally broke them apart and drove them away in separate cars.

Peter Orner, L’96, writes short fiction that has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and various magazines. His book Esther Stories—a collection of thirty-four short stories—was published by Houghton Mifflin in November. (A review in the Sunday New York Times books section said of the debut collection, “Orner doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls.”) The author lives in northern California and teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.