Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  Mr. Burman—

  The Fiskjohn matter.

  Mr. Burman—

  He loves her, which is his real problem, though admitting it to himself would take more than even Anita Fanska can muster right now. You come to love in so many ways—the routes zigzag and always turn into lies when you try to retrace them. It’s what Anita likes best about love, the way it twists you, boggles you, and she’s pretty certain it’s here with this angry little man who won’t sit down and join her, but who also lacks the courage to push in the button and stop the alarm. Because what he wants—submission—is so far away from what she wants, this sentimental girl who’s fallen so hard for her boss. She wants to love him in this elevator amid the jangling alarm that sounds like chains being dragged, while custodians scramble and the security guards babble nonsense into their walkie-talkies.

  Any people in it?

  Moron, you think a rat pulled the alarm?

  It’s a chance at love and chances don’t come around so often, and she pats the floor as if all he needs is a little coaxing.

  Philip—

  But my father stands on the edge of a beautiful abyss and dreams of power. He watches her sweat-glazed arms and doesn’t move, does nothing, which is why the aftermath, the long office August days, will be so much easier for her—because she sat down in that elevator and simply said, Philip, and nothing else.

  Seymour

  SEYMOUR BURMAN dreams he’s General Grant writing his memoirs while racing throat cancer. Dreams he is sitting in a wicker chair on a porch at Mount McGregor, New York, a writing board on his lap. Dreams of glorious reams of paper at his feet and of pain in his esophagus so incredible that it feels as if someone is forcing him to swallow acid, the acid like a liquid blade slicing, and yet still he writes, still he remembers, still it all comes back to him in a throb of valiant memories—until everything shoves to a halt like a marching army suddenly stopped and falling backward over itself. It’s time for Shiloh. Shiloh, Shiloh. Little church called Shiloh. How do you write about Shiloh? How do you say you were in a clean-sheeted bed in Savannah, a steamship ride away from your men at Pittsburgh Landing, when the rages of hell poured forth? How do you say 41,000 rebel soldiers—who you knew were only twenty miles away—took you by surprise? How do you say you heard the thunder of the guns during your breakfast and that you finished that breakfast? Your reputation to be riddled like the uniform of another mother’s son from Ohio, and still you chewed on?

  Sy Burman asleep with Grant’s Personal Memoirs riding his chest, snoring in his chair in the den on Pine Point Drive. It’s a Sunday in July 1979. The book rises and falls. My grandfather’s hand aches from gripping a pen in his dreams. Grant will never use his voice to speak again. Only these paper words. Seymour, who fought his own war, loves the little bearded hog butcher hero who won the bloodiest war of all, and now he inhabits the veined, shrunken hand that will not confess the debacle of Shiloh. That will avoid it, shunt it, spend what little eloquence is left on less haunted glory. There is nothing like the oblivion that coats memories we refuse to remember. My grandfather shivers with Grant, a blanket pulled up to his chin, a wool cap on his head.

  The Moraine on the Lake

  THE MORAINE HOTEL. Highland Park, Illinois. The wedding was absolutely splendid. The bride radiant, unworldly. Guests could look at her for only so long. Whoever saw a dress so white? The way you might shield your eyes should you be so lucky to make it to any place like heaven. Here it was. The Moraine on the Lake. It’s long gone. They knocked it down in the seventies. It was a sprawling white hotel with five sets of colonnades. To proud Midwestern eyes that had never seen one, it looked like a Southern plantation transplanted to our rocky bluffs. All that remains now are the towering oaks and the ravine that used to border the back, lakeside of the hotel, an enormous moat of dead leaves. Esther’s wedding at the Moraine Hotel was splendid. Even now, that’s the word people use, and it’s funny that knowing what happened later can never spoil this vision of perfection. Now the pictures of it are stuffed away. But they pale. They look staged, like black-and-white movie stills. The only way to see Esther Burman’s wedding is to reconjure it. Every once in a while the idea of it, that it happened, leaks, and people who were there are struck by the memory of her. Of course the groom was perfectly irrelevant, which makes people remember him only fondly, if they remember him at all. It was Esther. Every inch of her was glory.

  Her mother, Bernice, is fussing in the hall. Esther is standing in the bedroom of the presidential suite. She is wearing a slip and waiting. Her back is to the lake that fills the window. The lake is calm, almost sullen; the waves limp and whiteless. She sees it anyway. She thinks of how even the meekest wave yanks the gravel back and forth, up the shore and back. She kisses her shoulder, not out of narcissism but out of self-preservation. She fears the splendor and the praise. The praise. She already knows to beware of it, to hate it, though her mother eats it, compliment after compliment, like her favorite Fannie May nonpareils, chocolate on one side, beady candy on the other. Bernice, she glows. She positively glows. At the rehearsal, one chuckler waved a half-eaten shrimp in Esther’s face and gabbed: “They can see you from space. The Russians are watching you right now. You could make peace. You could melt even those cold fishes. Send Esther to fight the Reds! Send Esther!”

  It could be a chant: Send Esther! Send Esther!

  She kisses her shoulder to tell herself, Hold on, wait. Her mouth telling her body not to worry, that this will last only so long. That everything—she already knows this—lasts only so long.

  Now she stands with her hands at her sides. Later she will wear long white gloves, something that will occur to her years after as the most ridiculous thing about the entire day. She won’t turn around, only stares at the door and waits. It makes her woozy, the lake. She won’t look at it. She will never look at it. She waits for her mother, who in a moment will bustle in and merrily gasp, “Angel, but you’re not dressed!” Her hands full of a veil that will make Esther think of a heap of white lettuce.

  Esther Stories

  THE FACES of the pallbearers are always the same. Gallant and not trying to seem proud, but at the same time not unproud. That’s the fine balance, and when we hoist, it’s not our muscles but our sorrow lifting, our sorrow straining. My father lifts his sister. There are five other pairs of hands lifting, but mostly it’s him, and he doesn’t imagine her last moments, or any other moments before her last ones. He’s concentrating on his lifting, not saying goodbye, lifting, not recriminating, lifting. He has a job to do, and he’s like everybody else. His hands are no different.

  I used to prance around my grandparents’ house on Pine Point Drive in my Uncle Lloyd’s pointy, flimsy army cap, though by that time Lloyd was already persona non grata in my family. Whenever my grandmother saw me in that hat, which I’d found in a dresser drawer in my father’s old room, she’d wince and bite the inside of her cheek and say, “Take that off, Leo. I beg you.”

  One theory, a romantic one, is that things started to go wrong, horribly wrong, with my Aunt Esther after she was forced to break it off with Bo, a gentile, the only man she’d ever loved. (This last nameless Bo is always described as a gentile even though his not being Jewish was never an issue: the issue was that he had no prospects and he wasn’t going to college.) I’m not certain how my grandparents actually prevented my aunt from running off, but I assume (membership in this family for thirty-five years gives me at least this right) that they deployed a tried-and-true Burman tactic: psychological guerrilla warfare. Potshots from the hills under the cover of darkness. I can hear my grandmother muttering under her breath:…My opinion of course doesn’t mean a lick…only your happiness…never has…a mother’s burden to suffer this…children do what they wish…And of course in drops Lloyd Kantorowitz to the rescue! Some son of a friend of Mattie Rosenthaler’s. Handsome, modest, tall, ex-lieutenant, medical student. A faintly mustached man with long eyelashes and squinting, tentative eyes,
all three characteristics bothering my grandfather so much that in later years he often growled that he knew Lloyd was a zero from one look at his mug.

  I study an old high school picture of Esther and find it difficult to believe that the portly, angry, hollow-eyed woman who lived in my grandparents’ basement throughout the 1980s is this person who looks so much like Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: seductive, sweaty, a little nasty, a little pouty. In this black-and-white photograph in the gold frame I found tucked away in my grandfather’s study, in a cabinet under his shelf of Civil War books, is someone I would have loved had I been there.

  Not a surprise that at her funeral there were men like me to spare. Lonely grovelers who had known her back when. When she was Homecoming Queen of New Trier High School, when a single glance in your direction from Esther Burman in the slamming-locker halls was like being plucked from the masses by a long-fingered, just-widowed princess. Calling for you. Choosing you. And you pointing at your throat, confused and flushed, knowing she was making a mistake that would cut deep for years. A guy behind you or next to you, but never you. And her (the glance longer now, burning into your memory): Yes, you.

  So she married Lloyd Kantorowitz in 1963, and Bo became a Burman family footnote. I first hear of all this from Olivia Hodges, my grandparents’ housekeeper of forty-five years, a woman I loved as much as my mother, a woman who used to sing out family secrets as willingly as she’d serve grilled peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches to my friends and me after school.

  One day Olivia told me this: His name was Bo, but he didn’t look anything like that stupid name. A short boy with crazy dirty hair. No taller than your father and very polite. Politer than your father ever was or is. From here but not from here here. (She made circles with her hand to let me know that he wasn’t from near the lake, that he probably grew up on the other side of the expressway. West.) Esther said he played guitars or drums or some other nonsense. He cleaned up at your grandpapa’s bank, and no way in God’s emerald heaven was your nana going to let Esther end up with a man who pulled wastebaskets and swamped toilets for a living. Esther didn’t take ballet and piano and those posture lessons from Cootie Thomas downtown so she could marry a janitor. Use your common sense, Leo. Esther was a jewel. I used to pin her hair every night. She wouldn’t let anybody else touch it. She wouldn’t even go to Lamont’s with your nana. But did she eat that boy up! Talked about him night and day. Dreamed about him. Woke up in the morning, and it was Bo jumped out of a plane, Bo got elected president. Lloyd was polite, but so shy. Not like Bo, who used to come around to the kitchen window and make faces at me, wiggling his mouth trying to reach his nose with his tongue. Then out of the clear blue sky she told him not to come around the house anymore, and she went down to Illinois for college. Lloyd, when he came in the picture, would look at his shoes when he talked to me, and I’m the maid and he’s the doctor. But handsome. Not a hair of a nose difference between Lloyd and Rock Hudson in the face except that Lloyd was going to be a doctor and your nana liked that better.

  You can’t blame Lloyd for falling in love with Esther. Who wouldn’t have? Who didn’t? He was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. A Jew from some little town in Wisconsin nobody in my family could ever pronounce correctly. You think he ever saw a girl like Esther Burman before? She was a freshman at the University of Illinois and still grieving over her sent-away Bo, when my grandmother, her best friend, Mattie Rosenthaler, and Mattie Rosenthaler’s friend (always unnamed, as though everyone refuses, out of principle, to remember this last link to Lloyd) conspired to introduce her to the young doctor-to-be on the Friday after Thanksgiving, 1962. Esther was a sorority girl, already treasurer of the chapter and only a first-semester freshman. (A girl dropped out and Esther leaped from pledge to officer.) Lloyd was in his third year of medical school at Northwestern. They met at a cocktail party in the house on Pine Point, in the living room. The big room with the matching black leather chairs and the long windows and the shaggy brown rug that I used to run my fingers through and pretend was the thick fur of a dead bear my grandfather shot. Petrified Lloyd made Esther laugh when he fumbled and then stepped backward on his wineglass. Together they knelt and bumped heads, Lloyd in the heat of his fifteenth apology. Then my grandmother and her friends descended upon the broken glass like crazy pecking pigeons. Clucking: It’s not your fault, Lloyd. Olivia keeps forgetting to dry off the stems. Olivia! Help us here! It’s not your fault, Lloyd!

  The next Saturday Lloyd drove down to Champaign with a back seat piled high with violets and yellow roses and boxes of Fannie May chocolates. It became a regular date. Lloyd’s Saturday-afternoon drive down south. After driving three and a half hours without stopping, Lloyd would sprint up to the palatial oak door, each time as jittery as the first day he met her. Then he’d be ushered inside the forbidden palace, that nation-state of women. The front hall of that sorority house was every bit as grave as any European church he’d studied in high school. Flying buttresses. Vaulted basilicas. Carpets as thick and soft as a putting green. Curtains closed tight against the street like a funeral home. The house mother, fat and stubby, an elegant noose of pearls around her neck, standing behind the little embroidered couch in the waiting room, arms folded across her tremendous chest repeating, “We have rules in this house, Mr. Kantorowitz. Hard-and-fast rules concerning curfew.” Waving her chubby arms, nose crunched up as if she’s whiffing something putrid. “Get acquainted with these rules lest you find yourself permanently unwelcome at Sigma Delta Tau.” And then Esther would appear, a flutter of hair and unbuttoned buttons, the back of her dress floating behind her like a puffed sail, circling the couch, kissing Mrs. Roachwell, gushing, “Please don’t scare Lloyd, Mother. Can’t you see he’s scarable?”

  I shake hands with Lloyd after Esther’s funeral service. He sucks his lower lip. He still has that smudge of mustache. He is still handsome. “Difficult day,” he says. His hand is moist and sticky, and he holds mine too long, trying to make up for the cowardice of his words. I nod, and both of us turn away to shake more hands. Later, I watch him as he stands alone. His second wife, also a doctor, stands nearby and talks to an elderly cousin of my grandmother’s, a woman in a jeweled hat named Simone. (Apparently she is French, but nobody has ever been able to explain why she’s related to us.) Lloyd’s new wife has heard only horror stories about Esther, but this is a funeral and she murmurs to Simone in a reverential hush. Cousin Simone yawns. She’s never liked my grandmother or her children, and this whole ordeal is starting to bore her. Lloyd stands close to the edge of the conversation, but he’s alone. Alone as the aged high school boys who will go home to their lipsticked wives and sigh, Rosalie, I still can’t get myself to believe that Esther Burman could die. I watch Lloyd watch the spot at the front of the room where the casket lay before the men from Pritzger’s loaded it into the hearse for the ride to the cemetery. Later, Lloyd and I will bump elbows as pallbearers when we help move Esther from the car to the grave. But now I watch him squint at the spot. His head quivers slightly. If she was gone before, where is she now?

  If it is true what my grandmother says—that our boxes of family pictures lie like her cousin Ubby, the harness racetrack owner from Pittsburgh—then you should be able to tell they are frauds just by looking at them. But you can’t. And who is to say, without the interference of hindsight, that Esther and Lloyd’s early marriage wasn’t a happy one? Esther moved back to Chicago from Champaign and into Lloyd’s apartment on 1 East Schiller on the North Side. Years in my family are often identified by streets: Lunt Avenue, Rogers Park. Pine Point Drive, the first house in the suburbs. In the 1 East Schiller photographs—1963 through 1965—Lloyd and Esther are attached, tangled, cheek to cheek. Their grins are smelted together to form one happy gaping mouth. (My grandfather likes to take close-ups of his subjects’ faces. Backgrounds have never interested him.) To me, the smiles aren’t haunting. They’re beautiful, naive smiles that have no way of knowing what’s to come. They make me l
ove them. The them they were in 1963 and the them they became. Maybe it’s because the pictures are only of their faces. No rooms. No houses. No familiar trees to link them to their longer story. Esther’s compact little face and Lloyd’s awkward tilt toward her. He was so much taller. Two smiling, bobbing apple–​colored blushing cheeks.

  I cannot—as my grandmother does—scoff. I refuse to see only the bitterness of later. I should have known. We should have known. Seymour said he didn’t like something he saw, but who ever took what he said for a grain of anything. But just because I know genuine joy when I see it photographed doesn’t mean I can’t see, even at this early stage, what Esther’s trying to do with her eyes. In every picture from that period Esther is looking straight at the camera, smiling with Lloyd but also entreating her father, my grandfather, the ubiquitous cameraman, to see her. I say that was the problem in those years. She let people look but not see her. Her parents, her parents’ friends, her sorority sisters, her husband. Except for those moments—caught on film and now stored in a box in the basement—when she can be seen begging her father to put the camera down and look at her and just say, Esther.