Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  Oh, those people couldn’t tell you you have a cold. But they shuttled her around for tests. And then more tests. Tests tests. You wouldn’t believe how many hospitals there are in Chicago where you can get a test. Enormous hospitals ten blocks long you never even heard of. Finally, Reed Mental Health Center. Out near Palos Heights, wherever that is. They gave her a nice room. It had wallpaper, cream-colored. They tried to make it homey, and I give them credit for that. Say what you want about those people, and of course they’re all monsters, but that’s what they get paid for. Her diagnosis changed every week. The liars. But even so, they treated her well, and Esther…You know how Esther is in any social situation, even after all that. She organized things. A drama club. Gave piano lessons. She led nature walks. A troop of foot-dragging loons following Esther by a couple of feeble trees, and Esther would say, That’s a Dutch elm, that’s a white birch. She didn’t know any more about trees than I do. Certainly no one wanted it to happen. And your father? No. I’m going to leave him out of this—he did what he thought was right, and there was no arguing with him. But once it happened, I was against it. Understand that. Remember it. I went to the court and screamed at the judge, and they had to practically carry me out. One of the police officers whispered that if I wasn’t careful I’d follow my daughter to the bin. Times were different then—if he said that now I’d write a letter to the governor and get him fired. But finally it was better for her. I’ll say that. The drugs, yes. But also the stability. At Reed she didn’t have to carry herself. Go to the store. Visiting her made the whole thing look tempting, let me tell you…And she didn’t hate me as much when she lived there. Of course you know that changed, and she let me know the devil she thought I was. Don’t care about anybody too much, Leo. You aren’t doing them any favors.

  “I don’t feel the kicking anymore.”

  “You’re just getting nervous because it’s close to the time.”

  “Lloyd.”

  “It’s not unusual for the movement to lessen toward term. Many studies have shown—”

  “No shifting. Nothing. A week ago it was kicking and now—”

  “It’s normal. Don’t get upset. I’m telling you.”

  “No. I don’t feel any kicking.”

  Because he refused to stop loving her. Not because she was jealous. Not about who he was screwing in the linen closets at the hospital. I watch Lloyd watch the spot at Pritzger’s where they took Esther’s casket away. With all the people who knew her chatting quietly, respectfully…After the baby died. Because he assaulted her with his optimism and his willful infuriating blindness. This I don’t need anyone to tell me across the kitchen table over coffee. That screaming, that jabbing. Because Lloyd couldn’t see that the death of her baby was punishment for giving in so easily.

  It’s what he could never understand. He thought she’d settle into her life because that’s what people did. He bumps shoulders with his new pretty doctor wife, but doesn’t feel her. He hears his wife conversing with the little French woman. Their words mean nothing. Twelve years since he last saw Esther, but the wall that time built has always been hollow.

  They released her after ten months. (My grandmother had been telling anyone outside her closest circle that Esther was traveling abroad.) The divorce decree gave her next to nothing because of the evidence of physical abuse. She had nowhere else to go, so my grandparents gave her Olivia’s old basement room, the room Olivia had slept in during the four years she lived in the new house before she retired and moved home to the city to live with her sister full time. My grandfather got Esther a job at a credit bureau in Wheeling—she’d always been strong with numbers. At my grandfather’s urging she’d been an accounting major at Illinois (although she never got a degree). Everyone was grateful that numbers seemed to come back quickly for her. After six months at home, she even bought a car. She was thirty-nine when she moved back in with my grandparents. She told my grandmother she was going to move out soon, but she never did. By all accounts she got along well at work. Her employer—a thick-necked man who kept honking into a napkin—spoke lovingly of her at the funeral: She was the one everyone in the office went to. You see? Esther understood things, outside-of-work things. She made a few friends and used to go out for drinks with them at the Wooden Nickel in Highwood. At home, she was silent most of the time. While my grandparents no longer hosted parties, they often went to them. On some weeknights Esther ate dinner with my grandparents, but most nights she ate alone downstairs. Soups out of a cup heated in the microwave. Simple salads. Noodles. She never appeared on holidays. After the money toss on the boat she refused outright to go to my father’s house, and would not come up from the basement if he was present, so I rarely saw her during those years. I do know that she read considerably during the last eight years of her life. I often noticed gaps on my grandfather’s shelf of Harvard Classics. Writers like Hugo and Dostoevsky were often missing, but also the other names—the ones I’d never heard of—were gone too: Valera, Björnson, Daudet, Kielland, Musset.

  I remember she came into my grandfather’s study once while my brother and I were over. My father wasn’t around. She sat silent. I watched her scan my grandfather’s bookshelf as we sat and talked, and my grandfather laughed, leaned back in his swivel chair and told us his own most famous story. I was too old for the war, you understand? But that wasn’t going to stop me, no sir. Signed up for the local Coast Guard out of a sense of duty, a man has to have a sense of duty. And so they sent me out to search for Hitler’s submarines in the Calumet River on the southwest side! This was the part of the story when, on cue, my brother and I had always laughed when we were younger. We did that day, too. My grandfather pointed at us and shouted: But no, boys! I didn’t laugh! I went—patriot that I was and am—and scoured every inch of that river for sauerkraut. Ha! Did such a good job they sent me to the South Pacific. I watched her not listening, never listening—how many times had she heard all this?—looking over the books. She was plumper and shorter, it seemed, almost squat, but her face was still the face of Esther Burman from the high school photographs. The high-arched eyebrows, small mouth, tightly pulled-back hair. She was wearing new white running shoes. Suddenly she stood. She waited until we all stopped talking and looked at her. Then she left the room without a wave or a nod.

  And some weeknights during those years, my grandfather would shut himself in his study with his Scotch and the Tonight Show and Esther would blame my grandmother for everything. Slam the microwave door and say, Look what you created. And my grandmother would sit at the glass table in the kitchen (out the window, in the dark, my grandfather’s little tomato garden) and whisper, I only wanted the best for you. Only the best, but even your father (and what does he ever notice?) knew that Lloyd was a nothing and I should have known, too. It’s not Lloyd, Mother. It’s never been Lloyd. What’s it going to take for you to understand? But running off with a nurse like that. It’s enough to make you retch. That you insisted. It’s not what you insisted on that ruined me. I never forced. You make it sound like I had a gun to your head. I didn’t say force. Christ, if you forced I might have known better than to listen to any of it. Any of it! And then, this is what my grandmother told me, Esther would know that was wrong, that they were both wrong about everything, and she would start to shriek. Then the shriek would turn into a gagging laugh that sounded like choking, and in his room my grandfather would stand and turn up the volume on Johnny Carson.

  Esther’s grave lies next to her daughter’s. The gray markers are flush to the grass, modest, but solid. The man in the cemetery office tells me that they are made of pressure-tested granite from Barre, Vermont. “It’s a perpetual stone,” he says.

  With my index finger I smooth away the dirt from the valleys in letters.

  Beloved Daughter and Mother

  And yes I want to say something. I hadn’t known that I would, but I do now. That one way of looking at you, and what I know of you is that so much of your life was a begging off and
a begging off until—that was the cruelty. That when you finally dared, you lost.

  “So Esther knew before it happened?”

  “Not for certain. How could she have known for certain? I suppose she couldn’t have. But yes, a month before, she called me—not crying—and said, ‘Mother, Lloyd says everything is fine, that they often stop moving, but I know. A mother knows.’ She was right.”

  Esther Burman died of breast cancer on October 27, 1988. It was fast and deadly, and my grandmother drove her to the hospital every other day for treatment and finally, to stay for good, and Esther screamed and swore at her because she didn’t want to die in spite of what most people thought. A cruelty of the cancer was that she was so drugged she couldn’t read novels. My grandmother sat in the silence as her daughter stared at the turned-off television. Another hospital, this one a normal one—one she could tell people at the club about—but so much worse.

  Like my father, I never went to see her in that last hospital, either.

  I stand in front of Olivia and her sister’s house on West Van Buren. Late October 1989. Most of the leaves have fallen to the little brown lawn in front of the house, a low bungalow squeezed between two squat brick apartment buildings. A couple of boys on bicycles chase each other down the street. Olivia shouts from the screen door. Her sister Mag hovers behind her with a plate heaped with brownies and cookies and chocolates. I hug Olivia hard; she is still strong and feels—like she always did—pillowy and starchy. Her white hair pulled back tight and there is far less of it. A hollowing, some sinking below her eyes, makes me want nothing more than to curl up with her and just lie there. She’s laughing. Her sister’s laughing. Leooooooo. Olivia yanks me into the house and pushes me into a puffy chair and sits down so close our knees and feet touch. The living room is crowded with chairs; the coffee table has been taken over by framed photographs. So many relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and I never knew a single one. The blinds are half drawn. Thin lines of dusty afternoon light crisscross the room.

  “Esther’s dead,” I say.

  “You think I was born last Tuesday? I know Esther’s dead. A year ago this month she passed.”

  “Nana didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Upset herself! The business of that! I raised the girl. Upset me!”

  “Nana was so devastated. She couldn’t even think—”

  “You’re telling me about it? Now she calls me twice a week to cry about it. But don’t think I didn’t give her a taste of lip for not telling me about the funeral. What do you want to protect an old woman from? What haven’t I seen already? You’d think nobody ever died on me, with that woman calling me with news that’s not news anymore.”

  “That poor girl’s life,” Mag says. “Ravaged.”

  “Nana couldn’t even walk into the funeral home,” I say. “We had to hold her up. You know what it would take for her to accept help like that.”

  Olivia nods slowly and laughs a little. “Sometimes she went around like she never had a housekeeper her whole life. That woman. I can see her. Grieving enough for everybody.”

  “She calls to talk about Esther?”

  “Yes, twice a week. Some days I put the phone down on the counter and just let her go on. My ears get tired. I do the crossword. Ask Mag. Sometimes three times a week.”

  “It’s true,” Mag says.

  “But enough of that. Enough.” Olivia whaps my knee. “Talk about you.”

  Mag brings tea. She’s a large woman with a soft step across the carpet; she loves to have guests. Not to talk to them, but to serve them, watch them, anticipate them. Olivia used to talk to her on the kitchen phone for hours while Mag uh-huhed. I know, because I used to listen from my grandfather’s study. And if I was hungry I’d pick up the phone—then hang it up right away, pick it up, hang it up, pick it up. I did it till Olivia started hollering across the house that if I dared do that one more time she’d call her lawyer on me. Her lawyer, my father.

  “You look like you did when I was twelve.”

  “Don’t lie to this face, Leo. I’m so old. I never thought people got so old.”

  “You don’t look so old.”

  “Old as your grandpapa. Born in the same month. August 1909.”

  “He’s back to fighting the Japanese full-time.”

  “Well, that man. That’s what he was about. That war. Only thing that didn’t bore Mr. Burman was that over-with war.”

  “Esther,” I say, “do you mind—”

  “Uh-oh, Mag. Here he goes. Don’t I always say this one’s the poker. Always meddling in boxes. Sniffing around in the backs of drawers, my purse. Always eavesdropping on people. Used to drive his grandmother to howling for the police. Leo at her bedroom door listening to her on the phone, with his ear pressed up against the bottom of one of her good cocktail glasses.”

  “When Esther was pregnant—”

  “What kind of boy listens to two old gossips talking about nonsense?”

  “There’s something I think I remember. I just want to know if—”

  “Oh, Leo, please. Leave her be. You waste time.”

  Olivia turns to her sister. “She used to call herself the swelly-belly girl. Used to take the train out to us and walk around rubbing her stomach like a basketball.”

  “I remember you telling me,” Mag says, handing me the plate again.

  With my free hand I tug Olivia’s arm. “The time when I found that cat. Wasn’t Esther in the house that day?”

  “That kitty!” Olivia grabs hold of Mag, who has tried to escape to the kitchen for more of everything. “Listen, honey. We had three cats already and Mr. Burman hated every single one of them. He’d howl about wringing their necks every time one of them brushed his ankle. And this one goes outside and hauls in another one.”

  “It was just sitting there under the swings.”

  “Most adorable thing you ever saw. One gray paw. Well, the other cats are already starting to hiss, so I put the kitty in Mrs. Burman’s downstairs powder room, with a heap of dirt.”

  “For litter,” Mag says. “I think I heard this story. And then the Grandpa comes home early from the bank.”

  “And he had to go to the bathroom,” I said. “Came in, didn’t say hello, marched straight to the bathroom.”

  Olivia laughs. “Yeah, but we didn’t know that yet. That man was always barging by people with his head down like that. Man moved through houses like Dick Butkus. That day was no different. How could I know he was going to use Mrs. Burman’s powder room? He never set foot in there. Room was smaller than he was. But something made him, and he opens the door and starts hollering about the pile of dirt like he never saw dirt before. Then he saw kitty hiding behind the toilet and yelled, ‘Ollie—there’s a goddamn skunk in the bathroom.’ ”

  “Right. He went a little berserk.”

  “And then—”

  “Esther. You remember?”

  She turns to me and her eyes aren’t laughing anymore. “Leo—”

  “But she was there?”

  “Yes. I remember. She shouted at everybody to come into the living room. She said, Forget about your cats, folks. Forget the skunks, everyone…”

  I nod.

  “You got it,” Olivia says, because she knows I hear it, too. “That girl saying, ‘This baby’s dancing, dancing up a storm.’ And she stood up on the couch and let us feel her, and maybe it was true, but I didn’t feel anything. ‘Dancing the cha-cha,’ she said. And your papa standing by the door in his tie. He even smiled. ‘The cha-cha, my ass,’ he says.”

  “The turkey trot,” Mag says, and guffaws. “That’s some nuthouse over there.”

  “She said cha-cha?” I ask.

  “Like it was this morning,” Olivia says.

  We sit for a while, the three of us, looking at the carpet, at the pictures on the coffee table. Boys in school photographs against powder blue backgrounds, canned smiles. Then Olivia whispers like Mag’s in the kitchen and can’t hear us, as if this is something
not for Mag’s ears, even though she’s sitting right there with us. All she wanted was to kiss that baby alive. And I look at Mag, who’s staring at one of the pictures as if all this reminds her of someone else.