How to Fall

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“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

I
n 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.

“F
an 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.

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.

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.