Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  “Sorry, I don’t play.”

  He turned back to the cabinet. “Scrabble? Now, there’s a game. I know we’ve got a Scrabble board somewhere in here.” He started dropping game boxes on the floor. Chutes and Ladders. Connect-Four. Gnip-Gnop. Othello. Life. Battleship. Then he laughed. “Christ, Parcheesi! Whenever my brother Burt drove up from Louisville—wait, ah ha!” He held up the Scrabble game in triumph. His goofy pained face was like a child’s, more like Theodore’s when he pressed chewed fruit into my hands than an adult with a job. He unfolded the board on the coffee table.

  “I’ve got to call a friend,” I said.

  Don set the box on the carpet and looked at the fire. “Of course,” he said. “I understand.”

  “It’s kind of an important call.”

  “Right.” He sniffed and checked his watch. “Anyway, I’ll just sit here awhile.”

  “Maybe I’ll play later,” I said, to give him hope. I walked backward and watched him pull letters out of the box, slowly, one at a time. In the den I picked up the phone and pretended to call a guy from school. His name was Evan Magocini, and he’d never so much as wiped his snot in my direction in four years. He had blond bristly hair like the end of a brand-new broom. I despised him and lusted him.

  “Hello, Evan,” I said, loud enough for Don to hear. “I want you to know I despise you and everything you stand for.” I paused and waited for Evan to respond as the operator told me to hang up and please try again. “Another chance!” I shouted. “You want me to give you another chance? What is this, Wheel of Fortune? Am I supposed to sit around and wait for you to get done foaming at the mouth over Luana Palandri?” I paused as the phone began to whine a tone like our school tornado drill. “No, Evan,” I screamed, forgetting about Theodore sleeping upstairs. “No! Never!” Then I rammed the phone into the cradle. The house was still. Don didn’t come running. He had his own misery and he didn’t want to join mine.

  But God, did I want him to. Because even though he tried to laugh, he didn’t pretend. Sorrow was in his hands, in his eyes, in the blood on his chin, and I wanted to touch it. I wanted to do more than touch it. It would have been my first time, and I thought how right that would be. Another legacy of Lena Gold. She’d probably have approved. A little love for two who needed it. And I knew he would be gentle. Those teeny fingers unbuttoning my jeans, the same slow way he was picking up those letters, poking my buttons through the penny slits, one after another. But what if he refused me? What if after I went to him and nuzzled close and pushed the Scrabble board out of the way with my knee, he only smiled graciously and said, “Well no, Beth. I couldn’t.” I sat on that blue velour couch and listened to the cackle and spit of the fire in the living room and could not move. I sat and waited in front of the silent television for Don to do something, anything, to acknowledge me again. To say, Beth. To say, Beth, help me. To say, Beth, I want you to help me. I watched the silent television.

  When Mrs. Gold clattered into the room in heels, fur, and white leather, Don was gone and the fire had burned down to ashes.

  “Honeybaby,” she said as I stared droopily at her tower of hair. “You’re getting beautiful. Since when all of a sudden are you getting beautiful?”

  3.

  Fall River Marriage

  At Horseneck Beach

  SHE’S WEARING a daisy-patterned yellow one-piece and an enormous blue hat and she’s rubbing sunscreen on her husband’s flubby back. He’s got a cigarette drooping out of the side of his mouth, and he’s so pale he looks like he spent the last thirty years in a basement. She slides her fingers under his waistband. He leaps and yelps, For crying out loud, woman, on the beach in front of all these people? She hands him the bottle. Now do me. He takes the bottle and squeezes a burble of lotion into his palm. Then he breaks an egg on her head, one hand cracks his lotioned fist, and he slithers both hands past her ears. She does not scream, just says quietly, I’ll kill you you fat bastard. He shakes the remaining contents of the bottle on his own head and musses his hair. Now both have shampoo-lather heads. She takes his hand and says, I should have married Bea Halprin’s brother, Aubrey, the dead one. Let’s swim, he says. He’d have croaked by now and I’d be living on State Farm. I said let’s swim, he says. They walk to the edge of the water and linger there. That wasn’t funny about poor Aubrey, he murmurs, as his wife, who is Sarah, dives and shrieks into the cold June Atlantic blue.

  Sarah

  THE THRILL of murdering her mother’s plants. It comes back to her while pushing her baby daughter’s wicker carriage down Everett Street. Something about the wind and the shadows of the trees and the frightening radio reports makes her think of her father’s doom. She was twelve, and her father was smothered under piles of blankets on his deathbed, except that he wouldn’t die. And nothing could convince her that her mother hadn’t put him there. So she’d stomped across the house and yanked up all the plants by their roots, and run outside, tearing at her own hair as if it too were a plant. Her mother wondered to the doctor, who was in the house attending her father, if her daughter wasn’t possessed by something. “She’s always been an hysterical girl. It’s been known to happen in this town, you know.” And the doctor sipped his tea and laughed, but held off saying anything out loud about Lizzie Borden in a house so full of death already. Instead, he said, “The girl’s grieving, Frieda. Let her be.” But the idea made Sarah smile, too, standing in the long brown grass beneath the open kitchen window, listening. The idea of wielding that famous ax was not all that unappealing. Hadn’t Uncle Solly told her that when he was a boy he delivered newspapers to Lizzie herself’s door at Maplecroft, and that she always gave him dimes and pats on the head, even if she did do it? And everybody knows she did it, Uncle Solly said. So you could still be good after doing something like that. If she did it, she promised herself, she’d spare her baby brother.

  “He isn’t dead yet, Azariah,” her mother answered the doctor.

  And she remembers not hearing what the doctor said back, because she was already running, running down the cobbled streets, barefoot, stubbing her toes, hating her mother, and at the same time knowing how right she was—that no, he wasn’t dead yet, that he was going to linger in that bed with that goat, the maid, Lillian, sponging his head forever, and she’d never be free to blame her finally and absolutely for doing it to him, for all those years of haranguing that drove him upstairs to bed for good. Her father retreated, skulked away from living; he didn’t flee.

  Now she looks at her own daughter, her Rhoda, bonneted, curled up, huddled in blankets, one foot sticking out over the edge of the carriage. One little leather shoe. Walt made such a game about shining her shoes with spit and polish. A daughter of mine’s gotta look her best gorgeous!

  Again she sees herself sprinting across these bleak streets, into and out of muddy puddles. Her bleeding feet numb. There was a war on, just as there’s one brewing now, and she remembers thinking then she’d just as soon all the soldiers die, if her father had to die. Because, though she knew nothing of what men do after they fight wars, she could see them coming home already, alive, those marching men she had watched from atop her father’s shoulders, to flowers and songs. She could hear her mother praise them. And her father will still be upstairs, not dead but dead, and she’ll still be a girl who’s lost everything.

  She remembers running and being happy she killed those plants and sorry the doctor didn’t agree with her mother, sorry he didn’t say, Yes, Frieda, maybe this girl is possessed by demons. Because she wanted Dr. Buffington to examine her the way he did her father. Wanted him to poke her and look under her eyelids. She wanted to be the one, not her father, to rub her sores and rub her sores and rub her sores. It should be her in that bed wrangling, kicking off the covers (he was always either too hot or too cold), wheezing like an exhausted horse, rubbing. The one with Lupuserythematosus. A word she practiced saying, over and over. Such a huge and ugly word for a laughing, big-eared man. She wanted to be the one upstairs in th
e bed while her mother, in the kitchen, moans that the noise is killing her: My husband dying of a woman’s disease.

  Sarah wanted to be the one that stupid Lillian sponged and cooed.

  A mother now, a wife now, but the streets will always be the same. Farragut. Gardner’s Neck. Weetamoe. Massasoit. Wampanoag. Running, toes bleeding. She could never get far enough away. The baby shakes the bonnet off in her sleep. Her father died. The soldiers came home. Her mother still won’t look at her baby.

  Walt Kaplan Reads Hiroshima,

  March 1947

  HE SITS in a creased maroon leather recliner with his feet flat on the rug. The book is slender, nearly weightless in his hands. The door of his tiny study is closed. He reads by the light of a lamp that sits on a dark oak desk, now cluttered with a few opened books, face down. Otherwise the desk is tidy, with a lone paperweight in the shape of a terrier (the same one he once tried to glue to the hood of his Ford in a dig at Cy Friedman and his Cadillac DeVille), a heavy-duty stapler, a leather-bordered blotter, and a small framed photograph of his daughter as a baby. His wife, Sarah, gabs in the back yard with Erma Friedman—he can see them from the room’s single window—the ladies stand, wavy dresses in the gust, by the huge boulder that looms oddly between the two houses. It is late afternoon, Saturday. He reads. By page 13 the flat nonchalant terrorless prose begins its scream. Everything flashed whiter than any white. He reads.

  No one could say that Walt’s not a patriot. In the war he was 4-F. Wife and daughter plus extreme asthma. So he joined the Civil Defense. His job was to make sure people retreated to their houses, to their basements, when the air-raid sirens shrilled. Walt Kaplan, rooted in the middle of Weetamoe Street with his steel helmet loose on his head, ordering and pointing. A starter’s gun loaded with blanks jammed into the waistband of his pants, the idea being that if people didn’t move fast enough he could fire into the air. Once he’d threatened to do it when that loony Roland Shutan refused to stop mowing his lawn. Walt had raised the little gun above his head but hadn’t fired, and though the gun made him almost a soldier, he never liked the weight of it in his palm.

  And though the 4-F made him a coward and he despised it with every ounce of his soul, he couldn’t picture himself firing on anybody, even Rollie Shutan, even with a gun that shot only blanks. A man with a wife and daughter killing anybody. But didn’t Melvin Zais have a wife and son, and didn’t he die in Italy, a married hero with a son to worship his photograph? Didn’t scrawny Mel Zais die with a gun in his hands? Mel Zais, who worked alongside him at J. J. Newbury’s and later at his father’s store, who lived at 618½ Tuttle Avenue his whole life, even after he married Irene and they had Toby, dying at Anzio with a gun in his hands, sweet Italian soil in his mouth and a single Fascist bullet in his temple. Now, in this thickened quiet of 1947, when he no longer is called to the street (he keeps the little gun in his drawer), he reads of Truman’s bomb, more than twenty thousand tons of TNT, atomic, and Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge in his underwear. He reaches the bottom of page 48.

  To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain. No one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even

  Walt stops near the top of 49, remembering the number, not folding in an ear. He balances the little book on the arm of his chair. Father Kleinsorge, no hero, a German Jesuit priest in Japan, a thin, lethargic, bent-over cornstalk of a man. The man was sickly even before what Hersey calls the noiseless flash. Walt leans his head back over the top of the chair and stares at the ceiling and knows it’s lunacy, probably worse, sacrilege, an insult to the suffered, but he envies Father Kleinsorge. Envies him in his underwear in a country not his own amid the mute death, bodies under every bridge, on the banks of all seven rivers of Hiroshima. Frighteningly silent children coughing and dying in the smoke of Asanto Park. Sarah would say, Walter B. Kaplan, time to get your overheated noggin examined by Dr. Gittleman, some parts are grinding down already. And Father Kleinsorge clawing through the splintered wood of a ruined house for a voice faintly calling, and Walt Kaplan in the middle of Weetamoe Street with a whistle and a pretend gun. A child’s toy. A track-meet popper.

  He stands and walks the tiny room, pausing at the Kaplan Brothers’ Furniture Store calendar that hangs on a thin nail by the window. His father, Max, and his two uncles, Irv and Yap, in fancied-up oval pictures, his father frowning, his little uncles grinning: Have we got a deal on a sofa and loveseat combination for you, Mr. and Mrs. Oblinski, yes, we do…A two-year-old calendar, still on February 1945.

  Walt Kaplan, thirty-one years old and already his back hurts, his hair barely clings; he feels as if he’s peeking through a crack in the door on fifty. A soft-spoken man who after a couple of drinks will laugh and tell Old Fall River Line stories for as long as his friends and brothers-in-law will listen. Built a bar down in his own basement for that very reason. So he’d never have to worry about the bar closing on a story. New England to New York on the Old Fall River Line. That, and with a bar in his own basement, Sarah gets to keep one ear on him, and so long as he can drink a little and mostly talk, he doesn’t care that he never gets to go to Orley’s. Walty K.’s Home Front, Alf and his brother Leon still call it down there. Three chrome stools with red vinyl coverings. Heavily varnished bar top and Walt’s famous mermaid swizzle sticks hidden in a coffee can behind the old cash register. A big man, roly-poly since he was a kid. For the most part he carries it well—though stairs have always been a huffer and he fights to keep his shirt stayed tucked. Loves and fears his wife, adores his daughter to death.

  He doesn’t ache for the bravery. The reaching into flames, so unfathomable—seared flesh sliding off grabbed hands and Father Kleinsorge, not repulsed, holding on to what was left and pulling. No, something far more simple. Walt’s astonishment that Father Kleinsorge had vigor left to save. That his energy even half-matched his instincts. Walt stares at the calendar, at his dead father’s now berating eyes. Then at his father’s crumpled-faced brothers, the little bachelors who worked like dogs to please Max, who haunt the store even now, bitty wizened ghosts hovering among the lamps in the storeroom.

  He thinks, I would have collapsed in a fat heap had they beat us to it and dropped it on Fall River. The Japs or the Germans.

  The Civil Defense patrol captain for Ward 9 (Weetamoe Street to the 300th block of Robeson), me with my 4-F and cursed asthma and my Sarah and my Rhoda, and I would have wheezed and gasped. Would not have run from the chasing fire with babies in my arms. I am six years younger than Father Kleinsorge. I would not have saved my wife and daughter and the Minows, and the Friedmans, the Ranletts, the Bickles, the Pfotenhauers, the Eisensteins, the Corkys, and goddamn Rollie Shutans. A hundred thousand people writhing and shrieking, dying American style, the two onion domes of St. Anne’s exploding, both the Quechechan and the Taunton blazing, and I would have been under the Ford, whistle in my mouth, gun in my useless hand—

  Sarah knocks gently on the door. But as is her way—to remind him that her deference to his private study only goes so far—she says loudly, accusing, “What are you doing?”

  “Reading, Sarah.”

  “Reading Sarah? What’d I write?”

  He laughs. “Don’t come in here.”

  “We’re meeting the Gerards at the Red Coach at 7:30.”

  “The place that’s shaped like a caboose?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “Rhoda?”

  “She’s going to stay at Ida’s. Gabby’s over there. We’ll swing by on our way home.”

  “Fine.”

  Sarah stays at the door for a couple of moments, stoops, and looks at him through the keyhole. His back is to the door, but he knows what she’s doing because he heard her knees snap and her breathing sound closer. On
e time he taped over the hole with black masking tape, but she poked through it with a pencil.

  “I said it’s all fine, Sarah.”

  Her feet clump heavily down the stairs—his wife is no breezy chicken feather either. Without looking back at the little book, Walt opens his closet. He keeps his shoes and suits in his study. He picks up a shoe, takes it out of its felt sleeve, and inhales a big whiff of the polish. No smell like it in the world. All his shoes smell this good. Like taffy apples soaked in dye.

  Sarah tromps back up the stairs. She didn’t like something in his voice. As though their conversation through the door never ended, she says, “What are you reading?”

  “Nothing, Sarah.”

  “Walt.”

  “About Hiroshima. The Hersey book.”

  “The one where we’re supposed to feel sorry for the Japanese?”

  He opens the door. “Sarah, you don’t know.”

  His wife is crimson and anxious, standing in the narrow hall. She is thirty and raised a child during war (she used to send Walt out to trade vegetables for extra candy rations), got news of her sailor brother Albert’s death at New Guinea in a letter from the War Department, her being his older sister, his closest living relative. Not to mention Pearl Harbor. Not to mention what the Nazis did to Jews. Who needs more sorry? We’ve got enough sorry as it is. This man. So swayed by newspapers and books as if they were God and everything those men wrote in them was always true. As if what they said were more true than her framed letter from the War Department: With love of country and utmost valor. Has to crack him on the head sometimes to pull him out from under that reading. And she used to watch him from behind the blackened curtains of the kitchen window, standing bowlegged in the middle of the street with that whistle and helmet playing General George Patton, warning neighbors in a tone of voice they never heard from Walt Kaplan before: Citizens, if this was a genuine air raid, you’d have approximately six minutes and forty-five seconds. Those days, when the papers shouted U-boat in the Cape Cod Canal and scared all the old fishermen out of their bananas. Everybody watching out for periscopes in their toilets.