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The Second Baptism of Albert Simmel
A Novel
Rodney Clapp
THE SECOND BAPTISM OF ALBERT SIMMEL
A Novel
Copyright © 2016 Rodney Clapp. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-61097-107-2
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8532-2
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9986-2
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Last, First. | other names in same manner
Title: The second baptism of Albert Simmel : a novel / Rodney Clapp.
Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-61097-107-2 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-8532-2 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-9986-2 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fiction. | Title.
Classification: PS3623.I578 S35 2016 (print) | PS3623.I578 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
To my brother, Kerry, and my sister, Kimberly, who first learned storytelling—as did I—at our grandparents’ wonderful dinner tables.
1
Decades ago, when the people called Americans still thought of their country as young and its promises inexhaustible, these surroundings were all different. Albert ruminated on this in the dusk, ending one more long workday with the trudge home from the train station. He walked in what formerly was called a suburb. But he did not walk on a sidewalk. He stepped freely, casually, down the middle westbound lane of a six-lane freeway of Old Chicago.
Other pedestrians streamed along the same roadway. The vast stretch of lanes, seventy or eighty feet across, had been built to accommodate speeding automobiles and behemoth tractor-trailers. The freeway was the size of a substantial river, and once it had clogged and roared with traffic, a whitewater estuary frothing on a concrete and asphalt bed. Now there was no traffic other than foot traffic. A few pedestrians walked in pairs, talking quietly. But most sojourned apart, several arms’ lengths from the closest walker. Far from white water gorged and rushing, the freeway was tonight, as on every night for a long while, a mostly dry riverbed. Here and there trickled the currents of pedestrians. And soon, with the sunset, these intermittent currents would cease.
As Albert knew from his mother, and from books, the suburbs were once inhabited by the relatively wealthy, the so-called “middle class.” These days there was no middle class. The decidedly wealthy lived in the core city, at the east end of the commuter train line Al had just ridden. Mother said the suburbs had been referred to fondly as the “‘burbs,” a term that made Albert think of “burps” or “blurbs,” things comfortable and innocuous and mildly amusing. Babies burped, and books were reassuringly blurbed by the author’s friends. For as long as Albert himself could remember, however, people called the suburbs the “subs.” This emphasized that they were the home of the underclass, the subordinate folk who subsisted on vegetables and eggs collected from backyard coops, who toiled for the rich city-dwellers or cobbled together a series of handyman and odd jobs. Or just went without work and resorted to other means of survival.
The surface Al and others trod on was no longer smooth and unbroken. Even in their heyday, the freeways incorrigibly cracked and potholed. Lacking constant maintenance, the roads’ cracks widened, their potholes yawned open into what Al supposed would better be designated kettle-holes or cauldron-holes. After heavy rains, the holes filled and a duck or two might float on the larger ones. Weeds and wildflowers heaved up through the cracks in the pavement. Not only weeds and wildflowers: trees, saplings and medium-sized pines and oaks and elms, stood at intervals. In especially overgrown stretches, blanched white cement split into jagged squares and rectangles, resembling tombstones lying flat and scattered in a bombed cemetery. All this made the freeways passable only for foot transit and the infrequent bicyclist or horseback rider.
Albert arrived at a corridor where the freeway was adjoined on both sides by the ruins of shopping malls. The hastily constructed, gargantuan boxed buildings had at many places collapsed. At others walls and sagging semblances of roofs remained, though no plate glass windows were still whole. Strangely, what best endured were flimsy plastic signs. In garish if now faded colors, they skewed atop the rubble piles of walls that had long ago crumbled, roosted on rusty poles now bent and leaning. The ruins loomed at a considerable distance from the road. They were surrounded by vast, flat, ruptured parking lots. Albert imagined that the parking lots had once been like encircling deserts, where shoppers abandoned their vehicles and hiked toward the stores as if they were oases.
What surprised Albert was not that the malls were currently unsightly and uninviting. He lived in a world full of the decaying structures of another era. He was struck more by the fact that those who built and eagerly frequented the shopping emporia apparently really did regard them almost as paradises, as oases. And this to an extent that they never noticed that the buildings and parking lots were unattractive, that they were not visually pleasing destinations at which to arrive or among which to wander and pass time. Historians Al had read emphasized that in the period at the height of the malls’ popularity, great emphasis was laid on the functionality of architecture. Stores were built simply to contain (some were even called “big box stores”) and to shelter, as briefly as possible, the goods that visitors would rush to buy and remove to their own premises. Customers, it seemed, were so fixed and concentrated on the function of shopping that they lost awareness of the environment in which they spent entire days of their lives. No wonder the heedless, mindlessly acquisitive inhabitants of this earlier era were known in Al’s day as “squandrels.”
But now Al realized he was dallying. The evening shadows lengthened at his back. The sun was falling faster, the sky leaching its blue and turning red. Unlike the forebears who had ambled obliviously amid the malls, at various hours of the day or night, Albert could not afford to lose attention to his surroundings, or linger here after dark. He resumed a more deliberate pace. Ahead he saw lanes that split off from the freeway. They would curve, then loop, on to a smaller road that plunged between older, taller trees, into a neighborhood of houses with sprawling backyards, partly inhabited apartment complexes, taverns, shops, and churches. There, before darkness gathered into an impenetrable mass unpunctuated by electric lighting, Albert Simmel would be home.
≤
Albert pulled to and locked the heavy wooden door. Typically he climbed the outside stairs and entered directly into his flat, the rehabbed top floor of the Episcopal Church of St. Brendan the Wanderer. But tonight he wasn’t hungry. He left the open air through the church’s front door. Something—he thought it
