by Peter Orner
Not a letter opener she attacked him with but a butter knife—a blunt, rounded, harmless knife for slicing butter is what my grandmother says. Olivia insists it was a letter opener. Take your pick. What matters is Esther chasing Lloyd around the apartment screaming and finally cornering him in the shower stall. Pushing, digging the blade—whichever blade—into his shoulder as he crouched. Ripping his shirt and then his flesh. Lloyd not fighting her because he never, even then, refused her touch.
Oh! I tell you! Olivia shouted. Nothing was bigger in that house than when Esther was expecting and the celebrating was going on. Mattie Rosenthaler, and all your nana’s other friends, too, brought over enormous boxes of presents from Field’s, and your nana couldn’t stop rubbing her hands. What could be better to cure what people called Esther’s restlessness than a baby? Everybody shopped and shopped, and Esther glowed like a little pink peach, like she did in high school when she won Homecoming Queen and rode the float through town. All of us smiling in front of your grandpapa’s bank, and we waved and she waved. When she was pregnant she’d take the train out from the city and rub her belly, and I remember her saying, Ollie, do you believe it? Can you believe I’m the swelly-belly girl! And I cried and said, Esther, I love you, honey. You’ve got to take care of yourself now. Because even then, even though that girl was happier than she ever was, she was starting to doubt things. She’d say things like Lloyd doesn’t love me and he never has. Course I knew that wasn’t the problem ever. Oh, did I know that wasn’t it! Lloyd loved her like you’ve never seen. She didn’t want to be her. Makes no sense in a girl so beautiful, but it’s true. So beautiful that people used to stop the carriage when she was a baby. We’d be walking along and people would shout and point and say, Would you look at that angel. An angel on earth. But when she got older Esther used to stand in front of the mirror and stare and stare at herself as if she could change what she’d been given just by looking.
My parents were out of town, so we were sleeping at my grandparents’. I must have been eight or nine, my brother around four. It was late and I was tiptoeing across the cold tile of the big kitchen on my way to Olivia’s room, and the cats. I liked to sleep with Olivia, my face in a soft cat belly, my feet rubbing Olivia’s tough bony ankles. I had almost made it to Olivia’s door when someone sniffed. I turned and looked. It was Esther. It must have been sometime in 1968, because she had no stomach anymore. When I tried to sneak by, she stopped me. I looked at her again and, in the weak light of the driveway lamp, saw that she was wearing only a towel.
“Leo?”
“Uh-huh.”
She was eating cold spaghetti. She put her fork in the bowl. “I want to tell you something your mother’s not going to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“And I want you not to forget.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re going to sleep with Olivia?”
“Just to say hi to the cats.”
“If I tell you something, will you remember it?”
“Okay.”
Even in that low light I could see that her eyes were red and she was more beautiful than my mother.
“I’m going to be honest with you.”
“Okay.”
“You pay.” She stared at me. “You pay for everything. When you think you’re getting something for free—remember this—you’ll pay for it later.” She put her bowl down on the counter and came closer, knelt down. Her breath was hot. The driveway light was in her hair. “Please don’t forget this, and don’t let anybody, especially a pretty Miss Muffet, tell you I lied to you.” Then she held my arms for about a minute before she laughed a little and said, “You can laugh in this house. Even when Olivia’s not around to make jokes. You are allowed to laugh.”
My younger brother, Alex, remembers little about Esther. But he thought about it for a while and then said, “I spent one day with her in my entire life. I must have been six or something. Mom brought us downtown because you had to go to the doctor’s or the barber. For some reason she dropped me off at Esther’s apartment. Uncle Lloyd wasn’t home. It was a Saturday. She took me to the Shedd Aquarium to see the electric eels. Then we went to a park. Grant probably. She chased me around. We played horses. She got down on her knees and neighed. She let me climb a tree also. I remember that. And she didn’t tell me to be careful. She just let me climb. Then she took me to Granny Goodfox on Wells Street and bought me a felt puppet, a cow. In the car on the way home, Mom named it ‘Bossy.’ I remember you kept swinging it around by its ear out the window until Mom told you to cut it out.”
Her baby was born dead on February 10, 1968. They named her Frances after some great-grandmother of Lloyd’s and buried her at the Burman plot in Memorial Park in Skokie. For the first six months after it happened, my grandmother slept on a cot at Esther and Lloyd’s apartment. Either that or Esther stayed at Pine Point. My grandmother told me many years later that at first Lloyd resisted, but later tolerated her presence, because at least when she was around Esther stopped her terrible moaning. In that same conversation I asked, Did Esther really want to be a mother? I mean, given everything you know now, do you think she would have been able to handle it? We were sitting at her kitchen table. This was last year. My grandmother glared, but not at me, somewhere off to her left, as if somebody else, not me, had spoken. Then she said, “What kind of question is that? Don’t get so big, Mr. Toots, that you stop being able to understand that that baby would have rescued everybody.”
The house on Pine Point Drive was a dirty-yellow-bricked rectangular colonial covered by scraggly vines, as though the house was trying to camouflage itself behind the trees in the front yard. In the back yard was an old swing set, rusted out, one swing cracked in half, the other missing, its two chains dangling. There was also an old wooden boat—even then overgrown by weeds—that was the one thing my grandfather brought north from the old house on Lunt Avenue. The boat was our favorite, and I’d always race my brother to it. We’d start at the garage, run through the garden (with Olivia shouting about her cabbages), and if Alex didn’t trip me, I’d win.
True, her beauty made it easier for everybody, because nobody really had to look at her. It created the distance that nobody even knew existed until much later. But in my family there was also a little boy who grew up to be my father. While everyone else may have loved Esther’s beauty without looking into her eyes, my father saw someone else. The Esther she wanted my grandfather to see from behind his camera. And he hated her. Olivia says it’s because he thought his head was too round and he was too short and because he was older and because nobody ever repeated his name, called him angel, nothing. My father saw only the flawed, scared, restless Esther. The tantrum Esther. The Esther who used to go into fits as late as her sixteenth birthday. Ranting on the kitchen floor, screaming about her hair, and throwing her shoes at Olivia.
What it was between them I’ll never know. I have two brothers, two sisters myself. One of my brothers must have been the dumbest hoodlum in Chicago for five, ten years running. Little Davey Jr. We all called him Dodge. I didn’t speak to him the last year of his life. I might see him again, depending, and if I do, you can bet I’ll call him a horse’s ass to his face, even as I’m kissing it. But Esther and your dad had something else. Like they weren’t ever related. He was, what? Four years older? Since she was little he used to go after her. When your papa was away at the war, it was just your nana, me, and the kids. Your nana loved that girl so much, sometimes she forgot she had a son. Your dad used to follow me around. Yanking my dress. And when he wasn’t pulling on me, he was tugging Esther’s hair like he was plucking weeds, and calling her a liar about everything. That never stopped. Even after she got married—even after he found your mom and was married himself—he still said Esther was a selfish fool. Then he went after Lloyd. Both your papa and your dad thought Lloyd wasn’t good enough for this family because he couldn’t talk as fast as they could. The more your nana went on about his face his nose his c
heeks, his being a doctor, the more those two complained about him. But who they were really talking about was Esther.
This one always gets told with a grin, no matter who the teller. How one night Lloyd drove Esther eighteen miles out of Champaign, to a little town called Rantoul. The Rantoul story. How they cuddled up on a mowed-down cornfield with a bottle of wine and a blanket to see how many stars they could count. Lloyd kept a tally on a dollar. But Lloyd forgot to fill up the car after his drive downstate and they ran out of gas coming home at 10:45. Curfew was 11:00. They walked the eight miles back. Mrs. Roachwell standing at the door at half past midnight. Howling: Banned. Banned! Banned for life, Lloyd Kantorowitz!
After the service my grandmother weeps softly into her palm in the front row, grabbing and reeling in with her free hand anyone fearless enough to go near her murmuring grief, her shivering.
My father says now, even now, that he helped put her in the paddy wagon that brought her to the locked psychiatric unit at Rush St. Luke’s out of family duty and love. They brought a white-and-blue-striped Chicago police paddy wagon, and my father, in lieu of her nowhere-to-be-found, soon-to-be-ex husband, helped put her in it out of family duty, out of love, he says. He rips open a sugar packet with his teeth. I know you’d never believe that I did it out of kindness, and I did not. Out of love, because she was my sister and nobody else gave a damn. That worthless Lloyd. You think he cared for a minute what happened to her? After she attacked him with the scissors he knew he had a way out. And then, when he finally did leave, all that screeching and pounding Esther started doing on the apartment walls.
Nana says it was a butter knife.
Listening to my mother. No wonder.
And Olivia said the neighbor’s baby was bothering her, that it kept crying in its sleep.
A baby, bless Olivia’s heart! An old faggot lived next door, Leo! I knew him, a judge, lived into his nineties still chasing young clerks around his chambers. There wasn’t a baby for miles of that apartment. Don’t you get it? What choice did I have? Let her keep at it? You think I wanted to admit—even to myself—that we had a lunatic in the family? Your grandmother wanted nothing more than to let it all go on. She said that neighbor probably was bothering her. She said, What could Esther do but bang on the walls if management wouldn’t listen to her? Don’t you see what I’m up against with these people? But your mother has trained you so well to see me as the enemy in every situation that you can’t, won’t—so easy to judge me now. What could be easier than to judge me now?
Your sister.
My sister, yes.
Lloyd and that dirty little mustache, my grandmother says. Running off with a nurse. Mortifying is what it was. Facts have never been very important to her. Lloyd ran off with another doctor. But wasn’t the leap into another set of warm arms inevitable, a survival instinct? Doesn’t matter to anybody except my grandmother what job she had. A nurse, a little nurse, how obvious. If it makes her rest easier, let her be a nurse. The point is that Lloyd’s leaving gave my grandmother somewhere to put the blame. For all of it. The divorce and the hospitalization. For her, the two went hand in hand.
“Oh, for God’s sake, the man is an adulterer!” my grandmother roared into the phone one afternoon. I must have been fourteen. Olivia and I were watching baseball. She said of course Nana was talking to Mattie Rosenthaler. “A tiff. Little more than a tiff,” Nana was saying. “A husband and wife do that a thousand times a day in this state. And that’s grounds? While he runs off with the Red Cross, the court says her nicking him is grounds?” Olivia shaking her head and clapping for the do-nothing Cubs.
Olivia’s hair has always been white (even in the oldest pictures). The story about her that got whispered is that once she ran away from the family to marry a man. She went to Gary, Indiana, because her husband worked in the steel mills. This was after my father was born but before Esther. She came back after exactly a year. My grandmother said she never said a word about the man, not even his name, but my brother and I used to make up stories about him. We called him Gary from Gary, and said he had arms as long as the antennas on the top of the John Hancock Building.
The week after Olivia came back from being married, Dr. Zaballow slapped my grandmother on the behind and told her she was pregnant again.
Always white except when she wore one of her black wigs, which she did when she bartended my grandmother’s cocktail parties. I can see her laughing at Lloyd and his slippery fingers and even dumber feet. Thanksgiving, 1962. Stooping to clean up the glass and then pouring him another wine. Patting his round shoulders and saying, Doctor, can’t you prescribe something for my aching back? Forty-eight years old and already my aching back. Lloyd gulping and coughing: I’m certainly not a physician yet.
Watching, jealous already, my father stands in the corner of the room near the bar and talks to one of my grandfather’s friends about his future plans. He’s finally finished college, but is still adrift. He seethes over Lloyd because Lloyd is tall and, though a klutz, is already someone.
She tried to kill him.
She didn’t try to kill him. Even you can’t say that with a straight face.
She stabbed him. There was blood. Doesn’t matter whether she used a Bic pen or a machete. The standard for involuntary civil commitment is dangerousness. Do you want me to fax you a copy of the statute?
But they didn’t take her away until six months later. Up till then Lloyd was still living there. He lived there after, Dad. If he was so scared—
She was in hysterics. Even the old judge called my office and pleaded that I do something. Her attacking his walls all night. The man said it sounded like a riot next door. And Lloyd barely lived there after. In name alone. Since when are you so technical? She never denied attacking him. Anyway, you’re missing the whole point. She stopped eating, wouldn’t answer the phone. The woman needed help. Why do you refuse to see that? I’m to blame for what went on in that apartment? The same as your grandmother. You never look to the source. Take a look at Esther. Take a look at her life. Take a look at what she cared about from the day she was born.
“You can’t get all crazy over the little things now that you’re toting a baby,” Olivia told her. “Because then the baby’ll be born with nerves like yours and then we’ll all be in for it.” And Esther laughed and said, “Ollie, don’t talk that way. The kid’ll hear you. He’s got ears in his feet.”
In a box in the basement of my grandparents’ new house, the flat ranchhouse we haven’t even bothered to christen with the name of its address, I root out another picture. This one of my father in a sailor suit. Esther in a red dress between his knees. My grandfather has taken a few steps back (the kids probably waved him away), so it’s one of those rare photographs where there is a background. You can see the sides and the pointy bow of the rowboat. The trees in the yard of the Lunt Avenue house. They’re sitting in the stern; my father holds his hand like a little roof over his eyes, as though captaining the boat through violent sun. His other hand is clasped around his sister’s waist. You can see the tips of his fingers. Esther’s eyes are closed, but her cheeks are raised in delight.
The bike accident story gets tossed around. I first heard it from my mother, who wasn’t born a Burman (and like Lloyd had the sense to get out) but knows much of the lore, because a long time ago—no longer, God knows, no longer, she says—she was intrigued by the family antics. So she asked questions. She said that the way she understood it, Esther fell off her bicycle when she was eleven. She hit a crack in the sidewalk in front of the house on Pine Point, flipped forward over the handlebars, and landed on her head. Spent a week and a half in the hospital with multiple concussions. Her face was pretty mangled. If you look closely at some of the old pictures, you can see a scar that begins over her left eye and disappears into her hair. And though the doctors said she was a hundred percent golden, it has always been my grandmother’s private belief (this from Olivia, not my mother) that Esther never fully recovered from falling
off her bike.
I have this not-so-distant memory. A day on my father’s sailboat on Lake Michigan in 1984, four years before Esther’s death. She is there with us. She wears dark sunglasses. My brother and my grandparents are there, too. An afternoon of sailing, an attempt at reconciliation years after Lloyd’s flight, the time at Reed Hospital, Esther’s move home. The day had been uneventful. My father made a point of staying away from the cockpit, away from Esther, and spent most of the afternoon fiddling with the sails, winching and rerigging. My grandfather manned the helm. My grandmother and Esther mostly stared at the lake and sometimes spoke about the proper amount of suntan lotion and whether the buildings in the distance were Waukegan or Lake Forest. It happened, as a lot of things do in this family, just when we were about to leave each other.
My brother and I have already helped our grandparents into the dinghy, the small motorboat which will take us from our mooring, in the middle of the harbor, back to the dock. My father offers Esther his hand. She waves him off—saying she doesn’t need any help. Then her foot tangles in the lifeline and she trips, falls into the boat, lands in the dinghy kid’s lap. My father does not laugh, only says, “Jesus, Esther, I told you and now look, you killed the kid.”
“Fuck off, Philip,” Esther says mildly.
My father steps down into the boat and sits next to me. We sway. He faces Esther. He says, “I work my ass off, taking you out here. Buy you lunch. The whole time you sit—and now you talk to me like dirt. You think I’m dirt?” Esther stares at him. Then she opens her little yellow purse and takes her wallet out. Yanks a twenty-dollar bill, balls it, and throws it at my father. We’re puttering along in the boat now, all six of us squeezed, knees mashed together. The ride lasts no more than forty seconds, from my father’s boat to the dock. My father flings the money back at her. Esther picks it up from the dirty puddle of brown water between them. They are both in their forties. I am twenty-three and home from college and hot and sweaty and want off this little boat. My grandmother wears a white headband and a plastic visor. My grandfather dons his navy cap. My grandmother yawns loudly. My grandfather feels his breast pockets for cigarettes. Though I cannot see my brother’s eyes—he is sitting behind me—I know he is reading for the thousandth time the names that are printed in wavy letters on the sterns of boats bigger than my father’s. Unfazed, Wilmette, Illinois. Part-time Lover, Chicago, Illinois. Again, my aunt throws the soggy money back. It lands in my father’s lap. He picks it up again, crumples it. This time it hits Esther’s shoulder and she leaves it. Now she stares over the boat at the oily water slushing into small white waves. I don’t look at my father, whose face is splotched red, watching the money. I grab the bill and stuff it in my pants, and half-mutter at the dinghy kid, who looks about twelve: “In this family you pick up the crumbs.” But the kid doesn’t laugh, knows this isn’t funny. He knows it should be, but there’s something about these people that makes none of it funny. This ignoring older woman in white and the daydreaming captain. These two graying, infantile throwers, brother and sister. When Esther noticed the money was gone, she looked at me and said, “Split it with your brother.”