Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by David Rakoff

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, a Penguin Random House Company.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Chapters 6 and 7 of this work were previously broadcast in different form on NPR’s This American Life in 2009 and 2003.

  Book design by Chip Kidd and Michael Collica

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  Illustrations by Seth

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rakoff, David.

  Love, dishonor, marry, die, cherish, perish : a novel / David Rakoff.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3618.A436L68 2013

  813′.6—dc23

  2012038326

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53522-9

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-53521-2

  v3.1

  For Mark Greenberg

  And my family:

  Vivian, Gina,

  Simon, Ruth, Tom,

  Micah, Amit, Asaf, and Zoe

  With love everlasting.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Margaret

  Frankie

  Clifford

  Mother

  Aunt Sally

  Helen

  Captain Cocksure and Throbbin

  Susan

  Nathan

  Clifford

  Josh

  Clifford

  Hannah

  Josh

  A Note About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  The infant, named Margaret, had hair on her head

  Thick and wild as a fire, and three times as red.

  The midwife, a brawny and capable whelper,

  Gave one look and crossed herself. “God above help her,”

  She whispered, but gave the new mother a smile,

  “A big, healthy girl. Now you rest for a while …”

  But later that night, with her husband in bed

  The midwife gave free and full voice to her dread:

  “I tell you that girl’s in the grip of dark forces.

  This August her husband died, trampled by horses.

  She herself works on the packaging floor

  But she’ll be on her back for a fortnight or more.

  And as for the plant, they will take her back, maybe

  A fat lot of good is a girl with a baby,

  Her story’s too sad, sure, I almost can’t bear it,

  Nineteen-year-old widow, no family of merit.

  Her mother’s an eejit, the father a souse

  Who drank away all of their money, their house.

  You’ve seen girls like that who must go it alone,

  By age twenty-five, she’s a withered old crone.

  Even now, she’s as pale as a thing stuck with leeches,

  And thin! Her dugs ought to be ripe, swelling peaches

  Her milk may not come, and what comes will be gall

  (She gets some food from the St. Vincent de Paul).

  But true, if you ask me, I don’t know what’s worse:

  A life full of want or a babe that’s a curse.

  You know me, I think that most infants are fair

  But I’ve never seen so much Lucifer’s Hair.

  She’ll grow to a strumpet, or else a virago.”

  Outside, thunder tore through the clouds of Chicago

  And sundered the air that was needled with sleet

  Although it washed clean the aroma of meat

  That clung to the neighborhood’s mortar and bricks,

  And puddled up into the greasy, wet slicks

  That, once dry, would once again smell of old blood.

  To truly be clean would require Noah’s flood.

  Otherwise, always the smell of old carrion,

  Deep as a well and as loud as a clarion.

  The stockyards were too big. Each day brought a fresh

  Onslaught of slaughter, and smell of dead flesh.

  “You hear that?” the midwife continued. “This birth

  Is bad news, proclaimed both by heaven and earth.”

  Margaret grew quickly, a biddable child,

  Not overly sickly, her temperament mild.

  As a baby, her mother would sneak her to work.

  The foremen thought brats caused the women to shirk.

  And so she’d stayed hidden, quite comfortably swaddled

  In a nest of their overcoats. All the girls coddled

  Her, stealing a kiss ’til they had to go back

  To their place at the table, where daily they’d pack

  Up the loins and the roasts, all the parts of the cattle

  And pigs who’d been carved up, like corpses at battle.

  Frankie, dubbed “Finn McCool” after the giant

  Of myth, had his size, and was just as defiant;

  Big as a draught-horse and strong as a steer

  Frank had his enemies quaking in fear.

  The tales of his strength and his temper abounded,

  And God help the soul who might think them unfounded.

  If Frank said that one time, in Wichita, Kansas,

  He’d killed a man who had addressed him as Francis,

  Or how, at the Somme, he had taken a bullet

  And with his bare hands, he had managed to pull it

  Straight out of his flesh … more’s the pity for you

  If you dared to venture, “But Frank, that’s not true.”

  Even the foremen were slow to upbraid him

  Though he did far less work than for what they paid him.

  “Frankie will do it because Frankie can,

  A law to hisself is that wall of a man!”

  They’d met on the streetcar en route to the slaughter-

  house, she the young widow, a six-year-old daughter,

  And soon they were three, and ere long, for her sins

  They’d grown now to five, with a pair of boy twins.

  At school, Margaret learned basic reading and sums—

  But mostly developed a hatred of nuns,

  Who seemed to delight in a disciplinary

  Code just as ruthless as ’twas arbitrary;

  They meted out lashings and thrashings despotic

  (With a thrill she would later construe as erotic):

  Constance, who’d routinely knock Margaret’s slate

  To the floor, was monstrous and brimming with hate;

  The sinister grin of old Sister Loretta

  Who seemed to be driven by some old vendetta

  That Margaret tried hard to appease and to fix

  Although it perplexed her since she was just six.

  She hoped perfect conduct might act as her savior,

  But truly, no matter what Margaret’s behavior,

  They singled her out for particular violence,

  And so she perfected a stoical silence.

  “You! Red-headed terror, you want fifteen more?”

  She’d shake her head slowly, her eyes on the floor.

  So, when she
left school at the age of eleven

  To work at the factory, it seemed to her heaven.

  The girls on the line who had hidden and kissed her

  Welcomed her back and told her they’d missed her.

  Each day she would bathe in a sea of their chatter,

  Twelve-hour shifts—standing!—and it didn’t matter;

  A kerchief concealing her culpable hair,

  Her mother’s old shirtwaist, which thrilled her to wear.

  The great roll of paper they pulled from the wall,

  The huge spool of butcher’s twine … she loved it all.

  Everything seemed bathed in a heavenly light,

  Perhaps, it was just as a contrast to night.

  Supper, the same every day of the week:

  Some contraband meat; a spleen or a cheek;

  An accordion of tripe or a great, lolling tongue,

  Occasional marrow bones, rare (thank God!) lung.

  Both meat and the light at the close of the day

  Fried wearily down to a dead, bloodless gray.

  Some bread soaked in drippings. Then toilet, then prayers,

  Then waiting for Frank’s boots to batter the stairs.

  Drink, in some men, is a beautiful thing.

  Sweet Eamon Dolan finds courage to sing,

  Shy William Thomas will realize he’s handsome,

  But Frank holds them prisoner without any ransom.

  Who were you talking to? What was his name?

  D’you take me for daft? Every night was the same:

  Her mother would wash, while she’d dry the dishes,

  Frankie would pace the room, angry, suspicious,

  Occasionally some glass or plate would be broken

  (Those were the lucky nights. Crockery as token).

  Some mornings her mother used powder for masking

  A shiner, but soon all the girls just stopped asking.

  The threats go for hours. At long last he ceases

  And stumbling, half-blind in his boozy paresis,

  He crosses the room and falls into the bed.

  Nearby, Margaret prays, “Dear God, please make Frank dead.”

  At twelve, Margaret grew quite suddenly bigger,

  And showed the beginnings of womanly figure.

  The old shirtwaists that had once fit her just right,

  Had, in the wrong places, become just too tight,

  Clinging and gaping where once they had hung.

  Her mother was frightened, Sure, Peg’s just too young.

  The garments’ constriction confirming her fears—

  Though younger than Juliet’s fourteen by two years—

  The Romeos, pomaded, would soon come a-knocking,

  Cockaded, parading. Too true, though still shocking,

  Her Margaret gave off a narcotic allure,

  Just how might she manage to keep her girl pure?

  She tried as she could to conceal Margaret when

  They had to walk past all the slaughter-floor men.

  Each walk ’cross the floor was a dance of avoiding

  The puddles of blood and the catcalls of “Hoyden!”

  “Why all o’yer rushing? Stay back, you’ve got time.

  My meat’s not a rib, but it’s certainly prime.”

  Each insult occasioned a new gale of laughs

  They toasted each other by knocking their gaffes

  Together like musketeers crossing their swords

  Knee-deep in carrion but feeling like lords.

  That red hair, that figure, had adult men sputtering

  A wordless desire, or else they’d be muttering

  Dark boasts, which a harsh glance could usually halt,

  But the theme of it all was that Peg was at fault.

  That she had invited, incited the wolfish

  Responses, this siren, so stuck-up and selfish

  Who had no right acting so shy and so prim

  “You’d think she had diamonds all up in that quim!”

  “I’ll have you remember the girl is my daughter!”

  Her mother would yell, but the men of the slaughter-

  house would only be goaded to further chest-poundings,

  Barbaric, in keeping with their vile surroundings:

  The drain in the floor, a near-useless feature

  Meant to dispatch all the blood of the creatures,

  But gobbets of scarlet-black visceral scraps

  Routinely stopped them up, clogging the traps.

  Above them, hog carcasses, splayed open, red,

  Like empty, ribbed, meat overcoats, overhead.

  Margaret employed what she’d learned from the nuns,

  Deaf to the crude innuendo and puns.

  Her eyes she kept focused upon the far door,

  Through which she could exit the abattoir floor.

  She also employed something else the nuns taught

  Her by accident: namely to fly in her thoughts

  To a place close yet distant, both here and not here;

  Present, but untouched by doubt or by fear.

  For instance, she mused on the linguistic feat

  That gave creatures names quite apart from their meat.

  One didn’t eat “pig,” as one didn’t “count muttons”

  When going to sleep. Margaret thought of the buttons

  From bone on her shirtwaists, her boots’ good strong laces

  Of rawhide, and then, Margaret pictured the faces

  That daily she saw on the thousands of creatures

  Their snouts notwithstanding, how human the features.

  And, thinking about the brown eyes of the cattle,

  She got through the door. She had skirted the battle.

  Deep February, a bone-cracking freeze.

  The ice, like a scythe, felled the boughs from the trees;

  The blood of the stockyards froze into pink ponds

  And etched the glass panes with its crystalline fronds.

  “Margaret, go home,” said her mother, “the group

  will cover your absence. Take scraps for some soup.

  Francis has fever and maybe the croup,

  And Patrick this morning was all drowsy droop.

  I asked Mrs. Kovacs to take the odd look …”

  Margaret cleaned up, took her coat from the hook.

  The wind was belligerent, brazen and bold.

  The tram’s iron tracks fairly sang in the cold.

  The twins, half asleep, were reluctantly fed,

  She wash-clothed their faces and put them to bed,

  Before she had finished verse two of her lullaby,

  They’d gone off to sleep. And now, spouting some alibi,

  Frankie was there, “I come home, I was worried …”

  He did seem quite nervous; more sweaty and hurried

  Than his norm. “Where’s yer Maw,” he was able to say.

  “At work, Frank. You know, as she is every day.”

  Frankie seemed off somehow, almost confused

  In his very own home. She was almost amused

  Until she remembered that one would be wrong

  To find any amusement in Frank for too long.

  Sure enough, the change came, an invisible lever

  Was pulled and a new resolve—“it’s now or never”—

  Put steel in his eyes and a set to his jaw,

  He gripped at the jamb with a great, meaty paw.

  Somehow he had managed to shake off his fright

  And back was the Frank who tormented each night.

  Nervousness gone, his Gibraltar-like bulk

  Barring her exit, a light-blocking hulk.

  “Let me pass, Frank,” she whispered at almost a purr,

  The way that one tries not to jangle a cur.

  But Frank took ahold of her slender right wrist

  And, pulling her close with a threatening twist:

  “You puttin’ on airs. It’s always been your way.”

  H
e stood breathing heavily, blocking the doorway.

  He twisted some more, and she screamed, “Frankie, don’t.”

  “This is my house, my castle. Enough with ‘you won’t.’

  I seen how you look at me. Thrills me to bits.

  Tease me by tossing your hair, and those tits…

  Surely this won’t be the worst of your sins.”

  “Frankie,” she wept, and implored him, “the twins!”

  “You’d have me believe …” Frankie laughingly haggled,

  His smile a dark cave of teeth, rotting and snaggled,

  “… A fast girl like you when you tell me ‘it hurts!’ ”

  While his steak of a hand bothered up Margaret’s skirts.

  Mrs. Kovacs was sitting on Margaret’s bed,

  In her lap cradling the fevered girl’s head.

  Her mother, on seeing the petticoats, red

  And torn up, thought at first that Margaret was dead.

  “What happened?” she asked, dowsing a rag at the sink.

  Kovacs, fed up, spat out, “What do you think?”

  She drew herself up, “I’m sure I’ve no idea …”

  She made herself haughty when things weren’t clear—

  She dabbed with the rag at her daughter’s hot brow,

  But still couldn’t figure the Why or the How.

  Faced with the evidence, things still never sank

  In. Or wouldn’t. Until Mrs. Kovacs said, “Why not ask Frank?”

  And still then she chose not to see what was true,

  Instead, she grabbed Peg and shrieked, “What did you do?”

  “The poor girl did nothing. Your Fancy-Man Hero’s

  The one who was doin’. The coward. The zero.”

  But Kovacs should better have screamed at the wall.

  Margaret’s mother was lost in the thrall

  Of an anger, white-hot, she had no tools to parse—