Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) by Samuel Shem

toward the end of games, Orville tried to lose. If it looked like a win, he’d get ready as the clock ticked down, and the final whistle was like a starting pistol at a race and Orville would run like hell through the locker room down the stairs and up Prison Alley toward the Courthouse Square, Schooner chasing. If he was caught, he was extorted and/or beaten.
    Downstreet below Fourth was Henry’s home turf. He was poor and lived with his father, who worked nights as a security guard at Iron Mountain out near Tivoli. Their tiny house was close by the North Swamp among the poor Italian and Hungarian and Ukrainian immigrants, just a street away from the black section of town, near the Colored Citizens Club. Henry came from the bad part of town, without toys; Orville from the good, with a storeful.
    Before Orville had come back last August, the last time he had seen Henry Schooner was more than twenty years ago. Orville had been manager of the league champion Fish Hawk basketball team. The starting five—Whiz the black star, Konopski the tall farmer who played a solid center, Scomparza the kid who could rough ’em up under the boards, Basch the dentist’s son who could drill shots from long range, and Tommy Kline of Kline’s Whale Oil and Gas who was the sizzling, savvy playmaker—had made it clear to Schooner that if he messed with Orville he was dead meat. The Fish Hawks were hot. Tickets were in demand. Henry Schooner stole a roll of tickets for the big game against Troy and was scalping them. He got caught and was expelled.
    The last time he had seen Schooner was when the starting five and Orville, from the steps of the gym, watched Henry trudge away, his refrigerator body moving as if on wheels, his white-blond head unbowed. Just before he walked into the woods on the path that was a shortcut around Kleek’s Pond to the rough, impoverished zones of Downstreet, he turned and raised a middle finger at the team, mouthed a “Fuck you!” and disappeared into the woods.
    â€œA toast,” Henry was saying, rising from the table, raising his glass of port. “To Doctor Orville Rose, a welcome home, and to the memory of a fine lady of Columbia, a woman I often looked at as a kid wishing, since I had no mom to speak of, she could’ve been my mom. I’m talking about your mom, yours and our dear Penny’s, Selma Rose.”
    â€œTo Orville and Selma Rose!” shouted all.
    â€œA wonderful couple!” shouted Milt.
    All eyes turned to Orville for a response. Given a whole childhood of Schooner’s threatening him with “If you tell anyone, especially your mother, I’ll kill you!” and given the smarminess of the toast that made Orville feel like throwing up the mousse, the coq, the sorbet in between and the two wines, it was only with the greatest discipline that he was able to rise, swallow his revulsion at Schooner’s current duplicity, and speak.
    â€œThank you, Henry. Being back here again after so many years has been, well, sort of great, and I greatly appreciate your kind, great, really, words about my—our—mother. It’s been the greatest evening, a really great dinner. Penny and I greatly appreciate it.”
    It sufficed. The conversation rolled on. He sat there quietly drinking until Penny, in a lull, visibly perturbed that Orville was silent, said, “Penny for your thoughts.”
    â€œOh,” Orville said, startled, for he had been in a reverie about Celestina Polo and the twenty tiny chapels set among the cypresses and gravestones on the pilgrimage site on top of the Sacre Monte. “I . . . uh, I was just wondering, why whales?”
    â€œOh, Christ!” Milt said, in mock horror. “Him and his whales!”
    â€œWhat about the whales, dahlin’?” asked Nelda Jo. She was a dazzling, elegant blonde from Tulsa, with a nose just a touch too flat. She taught aerobics at Schooner’s Spa out