How to Fall

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  How to Fall

  Signs of Life

  Eyesore

  Mates

  The Large Lady

  Trifle

  Vegetarian Chili

  Rules

  Home Schooling

  TAK FEEBLE PUT FOIBLE TRN ELSEWHERE

  Shenanigans

  Madame Guralnick

  The Message

  If Love Were All

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  Purim Night

  The Coat

  The Story

  THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  for the young Pearlmans

  Jessica

  Charles

  Naomi

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “How To Fall” Idaho Review

  “Eyesore” Ascent

  “Mates” Pleiades

  “The Large Lady” Crosscurrents

  “Trifle” West Branch

  “Vegetarian Chili” Happy

  “Rules Witness

  “Home Schooling” Alaska Quarterly Review

  “Shenanigans” Ascent

  “Madame Guralnik” Midstream

  “The Message” An Inn in Kyoto

  “If Love Were All” turnrow

  “Purim Night” Witness

  “The Coat” Idaho Review

  “The Story” Alaska Quarterly Review

  Awards

  “Mates” Pushcart Prize XXV

  “Vegetarian Chili” NPR (“The Connection”) Award

  “If Love Were All” Moment Fiction Award—Second Prize

  “Madame Guralnik” Boston Review Award—Second Prize

  “The Story” O. Henry Prize, 2003

  FOREWORD

  In Edith Pearlman’s story “Signs of Life,” two unremarkable women settle in a suburb outside of Boston. They nurture attachments, battle illness, and grow old. Eventually, we can be sure, they will disappear, and much of their lives will be forgotten. But Edith Pearlman suggests that experience, no matter how routine, will be spiced with singular adventures. And evidence of singularity is difficult to erase. No matter what these women do to keep from drawing attention to themselves, they will be remembered through the stories told about them, and the stories will give their audience the means to imagine what has been left unsaid.

  Another unremarkable couple arrives in the same town. They rent the top of a three-story house on Lewis Street. They work and raise their children. Eventually they move away, and after they’re gone their neighbors realize that much about the couple remains uncertain. Who were they? Where have they gone? Why do we care? We do care, Edith Pearlman insists. In her hands, the uncertainties surrounding the lives of neighbors and acquaintances are as intriguing as the scraps of fact and prompt us to consider what happens when the story is over. Even if we can’t know what follows an ending, we can learn something about ourselves from the concentrated effort to understand.

  Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed. “They were not adventurous, no, no!” she writes. “Whenever someone suggested otherwise they raised four protesting palms in negation as if they were under arrest.” Humdrum appearances fail to disguise individuality. Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation. They fall in love. They fall to pieces. They make secret sacrifices. They take daring risks. They wonder if they have lived justly, fully, completely. They ask themselves questions that challenge complacency. “Hell gapes for the merely empathic: that was what Bill was beginning to think.”

  Wide-ranging in her settings, from the stage of a television comedy to a pawnshop in Istanbul, suburban New England, London during the Second World War, and contemporary Jerusalem, Edith Pearlman gives us the means to imagine what is worth remembering. In each of these stories, she honors the simple strangeness of life—the distinctive oddity of sheer persistence, as in the portraits of the women in “Signs of Life”: “They are old women now—remarkable at last, just for being so old, and for maintaining independence and health.” Whether the characters choose to settle or move on, resume or change their routines, they respond to unexpected turns of fortune with passion that is as assured as Edith Pearlman’s prose. Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer.

  —Joanna Scott

  How to Fall

  “Fan mail!” brayed Paolo. “Come and get it.”

  Every Monday and Tuesday Paolo lugged a canvas sack from the studio to the rehearsal room at the Hotel Pamona. Until recently Paolo had been Paul. The change in name was going to get Paul/Paolo strictly nowhere, in Joss’s opinion; but teenagers had to transform themselves every month or so—he had read that somewhere. After dropping off the mail Paolo picked up lunch for the television brass and brought it back to the studio. He told Joss that he hoped to become a comedian. The letters that came out of the sack smelled of deli. Some envelopes had greasy stains.

  “Missives!” He swung the sack onto the round table in the corner, loosened its neck, and allowed some of the letters to spill out—fussy business, too many little motions; but Joss kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t in the coaching game. Besides, silence was what he got paid for.

  Happy Bloom had been rehearsing his opening monologue— the one he delivered in a tuxedo, the one with the snappiest jokes—in front of the wide mirror between the windows. But when he saw Paolo he whirled, stamped, and called a recess. He loved his fans. He got quantities of letters, all favorable. He was “the New Medium’s New Luminary”—Time magazine itself had said so when it ran his picture on the cover last December. Churchill was on the cover the week before, Stalin the week afterwards, you’d think Happy had conferred with those guys at Yalta. But Happy was bigger than a statesman; he was an honorary member of every American family. On Thursday nights at five minutes to eight the entire nation sat down to watch the Happy Bloom Hour... And on Friday nights, as maybe only Joss knew, Heschel Bloomberg, wearing a gray suit and horned-rimmed glasses, without greasepaint, without toupee, unrecognized, welcomed the Sabbath with the other congregants in a Brooklyn Synagogue.

  Joss admired the funnyman’s faith. Himself, he hadn’t been inside a church in eighteen years, not since the morning his daughter was baptized. But he had graduated from a Jesuit high school; he had believed in things then... “I like the routine in the shul, no improvising,” Happy told him. “The cantor’s a baritone, not bad if you like phlegm.”

  The Heschel Bloomberg placidly worshipping on Friday night reverted to Happy Bloom on Saturday morning. Writing and rehearsals started at nine; he usually threw his first tantrum by ten.

  But today was Tuesday—the show already shapely, the skits established. There’d be only a couple of outbursts. Now Happy settled himself at the table to devour his mail. Joss strolled over to one of the windows and breathed New York’s October air. Happy might snuggle with the country; he, Joss, belonged to this stony metropolis which kept forgetting his name, oh well.

  “There’s a fan letter for you, Mr. Hoyle,” Paolo said, and did a Groucho with his eyebrows. He extracted a pale green square from the heap and walked it over to Joss, heel-toe, heel-toe, poor sap.

  No return address on the envelope. Joss opened it. Slanted words lay on a page the color of mist. He brought the letter up to his nose. No scent.

  Dear Mr. J
ocelyn Hoyle,

  I’m a big reader (though small in physique). Television leaves me absolutely frigid. I don’t ever watch hardly. Those wrestlers—shouldn’t they sign up at a fat farm? Happy Bloom smiles too much. Much too much too much.

  But I admire your face. Your long mouth makes thrilling twitches. Your dark eyes shift, millimeterarily. Those eyes know hope. Those eyes know hope deferred. Those eyes know hope denied. Oh!

  The Lady In Green

  Joss looked up. “This is a fan?” he inquired of the city. He sniffed the paper again.

  The second letter arrived the next week, on show day, at the studio—they rehearsed there Wednesdays and Thursdays. Happy was screaming at the orchestra; at the properties-and-scripts woman who held the whole enterprise together, she had a name but he called her the Brigadier; at the writers; at the cameramen; at Joss. Paolo came around, the sack of mail on his shoulder. Joss took the letter from Paolo and put it into his pocket, unopened.

  The show went all right. They had a fading tenor for the next-to-last number leading into Happy’s wind-up monologue, the sentimental one. Joss stood listening to the tenor in what passed for wings. The studio had some nerve calling this a stage, wires and cables all over the joint. He’d worked Broadway, rep, vaudeville; the worst house he’d ever played in had kept itself in better shape than the New Medium. The two circuses he’d traveled with were tight as battleships; well, circuses couldn’t afford bad habits ... “Nessun dorma,” sang the has-been. He was at the point in his decline that Joss liked best: ambition flown; to hell with the high notes; emotion at last replacing resonance. He wore a tux and make-up but he might as well have been naked; Joss could sense the paunch under the corset, he could imagine the truss too, oh, the eternal sadness of fat men.

  They all had a quick one afterwards—Joss and the producer and the Brigadier drinking whisky, the tenor brandy, Happy his usual ginger ale. Then Joss ran down into the subway. Searching his pocket for a token, he found the letter.

  Dear Mr. Hoyle,

  Ho! I’ve found you! Id est, I looked you up in “Who’s Who In American Entertainment.” Also in newspapers in the New York Public Library.

  You were born in 1903, in Buffalo. You’ve been an acrobat. So have I—in my dreams. You served in the armed forces during the War. You have a wife and a daughter.

  Such calm lids, such haunted eyes. Your expression is holy.

  I wonder where you went to college after that Jesuit high school. Who’s Who doesn’t say.

  The Lady In Green

  He’d been a poor boy, but they were all poor boys at the school. He liked every subject, history best. Father Tom’s breathless oratory made history alive. Father Tom’s eyes were green and moist, like blotting paper. The way the fathers lived, there behind the school…a quiet, chuckling sort of house, with Brother Jim their beloved fool. Joss too would teach some day, history maybe. The Fathers mentioned a scholarship to the State University. But he came to see that it was not Father Tom’s subject he loved, not even the teaching of it—it was the delivery. He loved jesting too: not jokes like Brother Jim’s, not words at all, but glancing and by-play and pratfalls. So he had joined a troupe right after graduation, disappointing his mentors and breaking his mother’s heart. Now this letter-writing individual wanted him to relive those times . . . In the late-night uncrowded subway car he stood up, briefly enraged, and shook himself. A man slid uneasily along the bench away from Joss; who could blame him; in the black glass of the window jiggled Joss the crazed marionette. The window threw back his face, too: the face the Lady called holy.

  When he got home he put the second letter on top of the first in the bottom drawer of the dresser, underneath his sweaters. He could have stuck it between the salt-and-pepper cellars on the kitchen table, for all Mary cared.

  She was asleep, lying on her back, her thin hands side by side on the coverlet. She would have watched the program in the darkened living room, bourbon at her elbow, already wearing nightgown and wrapper. Already? There were days she never got dressed at all. Tomorrow, on their walk to the train, she would tell him about his performance in a flat voice. How the camera had cut him in half not once but several times. How it had dropped him entirely during the production number. How Happy held the audience in the palm of his hand. How Joss had outlived his usefulness . . . but she wouldn’t say that.

  The specialists he’d brought Mary to always first acknowledged the tragedy of their daughter’s condition, then suggested that Mary’s attachment and grief were excessive. You could have a second child. You should have a second child. You are in your twenties, Mrs. Hoyle... You are in your thirties . . . You are not yet forty.

  Hospitals had been tried; baths; insulin. Nothing made a difference. She had been a darling little thing with soft lashes when they met; but the small downturned smile on her pointed face might have warned him of her fragility... A second child? He had too many children as it was. He had his sad-sack kid brothers, he had his damaged wife, he had Happy. And he had Theodora, Teddie, his one issue. Every Friday they went to visit her. It was Friday now, wasn’t it—he glanced at the clock as he wearily undressed: one a.m. In a few hours he and Mary would walk to Grand Central and take the train and get off the train and take a bus and get off the bus and walk two blocks. They’d come to the iron gate. The guard nodded: he knew them.

  Teddie knew them. She made that hideous moan; or she covered her eyes with huge hands. Sometimes obesity seemed the worst thing about her. She wore cotton dresses made by Mary, all from the same hideous pattern—short-sleeved, smocked, white collared. The fabrics were printed with chickens or flowers or Bambis. Sometimes Joss felt shamed by Happy Bloom’s drag—lipsticked face and fright wigs and bare masculine shoulders emerging from an oversized tutu, or yellow braids flopping onto a pinafore—but why should Joss feel shamed, Happy was the one who should feel shamed, big famous comedian aping big retarded girl. Aping? Happy had never seen Teddie. “How’s your daughter?” Happy would ask maybe once a year, his gaze elsewhere. “The same,” Joss always said.

  Though she was not always the same. He sometimes sensed a change. The exhausted staff shrugged. “Not growth,” one of the doctors warned, his English infirm; “not expect growth, no.” Okay; but once in a while her unforgiving expression softened a little, or her vague look of recognition slid into an equally vague one of welcome. If she could only talk. Perhaps she understood, a little. When they were alone—when Mary had left for one of her desperate walks around the fenced-in pond—he told Teddie that he loved her. He held her fat fingers. He kissed her fat cheek.

  “Hoyle!”

  Joss took his place at the table with Happy and the Brigadier and the writers. They revised, argued, laughed. Every so often Joss dropped his hand into his pocket and fingered this week’s letter from The Lady in Green. He knew it by heart—he memorized each one now, like a script, easy as breathing.

  Happy Bloom’s loud good humor—I guess the public wants it.

  Happy and the writers avoided the raw subject of the recent War. But the Europe exposed by the War had inspired many of Happy’s inventions—the British dowager, for instance; the French floorwalker; even the milkmaid who yodeled first and then warbled in Yiddish.

  But you—the silent consort—are what the public needs.

  The public needed the dowager’s meek husband? The floorwalker’s intimidated customer? The milkmaid’s goat—a horned, garlanded, Joss-faced goat who raised itself on two hoofs and executed a double-flap and a shuffle.

  I absolutely adore the dancing goat.

  Happy and Joss would be wallpaper hangers this Thursday. Costumed in overalls they would lift a protesting clerk, chair and all, out of an office. They would heedlessly paper over bookcases, radiators, paintings. The rolls of wallpaper wouldn’t match. Happy would disappear into a doorless closet to decorate its inner walls. Joss would paper over the recess. There’d be shouts from the imprisoned Happy, in a variety of accents; he’d sing a few bars of “Alon
e”; he’d sing “Somewhere I’ll Find Me.” At last his head would burst through the paper, that round loveable head: the teeth, slightly buck anyway, goofily enlarged; a multitude of curls spilling over the brow; the eyebrows darkened and the eyes kohled. While Happy mugged to applause, Joss’s back would be turned to the audience—the silent consort, papering a window.

  “The show was funny,” Mary acknowledged on the train that Friday. “You were funny.” Her smiled turned downwards as it had in her young womanhood—but it was a smile; it was.

  Teddie, sitting, looked away when they came, and banged her forehead against the hip of an attendant. After a while she stopped banging. The weather was mild for January; they sat on metal chairs in the brown garden. The paint on his chair was chipping. At these prices you’d think . . . It was better not to think.

  You know something? He depends on you! Maybe you depend on each other.

  And maybe she too endured a mutual dependence, a marriage of convenience, a spousal alliance like his with Happy. Poor Happy —overbearing mother, two greedy ex-wives, years on the circuit, years in radio; and then, at last, seized by the new men of the New Medium.

  Joss was doing third lead in a musical at that time, playing a father-in-law. The thing was holding on. Demobilized servicemen liked it. People were traveling again: out-of-towners liked it. It gave him a chance to hoof a little.