Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  The scuttling together people do by a window during a storm. We are like that. The funeral will be closed casket. This is the private family viewing. My father steps closer and looks at her. Esther’s hands are twined so tight they make a single fist. Then he removes a hand and touches her. This sister in beige taffeta, heavy makeup, a wig. He does this. It’s a part of your story even if you don’t want it. He takes his hand out of his pocket and reaches into the casket, and at least one finger touches your fist. Skin that never met in life. My grandmother presses her wet forehead into the back of my neck and murmurs.

  Knuckles meet the sorority house door, but softly. Though he’s been running, he doesn’t want to knock yet. The door hard and looming beneath his fingers. It’s this moment he wants. The almost seeing her, not the seeing. Years later, after the first of many ends, Lloyd will still conjure this beautiful almost. His hesitant approach down the long corridor toward their apartment, his fear, his shoes noiseless across the carpet. The unlocking of their door. Her emergence from the bedroom that was never his even when it was his to sleep in. How it all whirls him back. Mrs. Roachwell, Mrs. Roachwell, I’m coming. Tell that boy to stop shaking in his boots! That first burst of Esther into any room.

  The Waters

  THEY DIDN’T HAVE a dime. Nobody they knew did either (except their daughter’s husband, Seymour, and he probably stole it); it was 1939. But when Rachel Shlansky wanted something, it was only a question of when. So they gave their store away for a song—“Ten Cents a Dance,” Louie crooned—and moved south to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they opened a small café on East Malvern, around the corner and three blocks down from Bathhouse Row. Rachel waited on the tables. Louie cooked behind a screen so people couldn’t see his shakes.

  Louie Shlansky was a gaunt, kind, terribly short-legged man with an acid tongue and no bite, who loved to tell stories on himself. They were all lies, worse than lies. Rachel called them perversions, but Louie loved to make people laugh; he didn’t give a damn how. Besides, his philosophy was that stories are more believable when yours truly is the punch line. Rachel, who was literal about everything, used to tell people, No, I was there the whole time, and nothing even remotely like that happened. But after the shakes attacked him, a little man, with such vengeance, she let him have whatever joys were left. It didn’t take much for her to hold her tongue while he blathered onward. Like his famous and always-more-stupid-than-the-last-time-he-told-it nonsense about the time the police mistook him for a ranking member of the Chicago branch of the Purple Boys. You want to know? I’ll tell you. You ever been to Bedlam? Two cops, Cheesus, running me down like I’m Jew Kid Grabiner. Look at me. I look anything like Jew Kid Grabiner to you? So I’m hightailing two miles, no seven, seven miles, before I fall down a manhole on South Halsted. The dumb paddies tumble in behind me, so the three of us are down there groping in the dark, and one of them goes, Anybody got a light? And I say, You kidding? I’ve got cigars! And the other cop says, See, I knew this guy was a Purple Boy, and they start whacking me with their sticks, and I’m shouting, Boys, boys, you got it all wrong, I’m a butter-and-egg man, I only do sundries on the side!

  Behind his back and sometimes in front of it, his pals in Rogers Park called Rachel “the claw.” To them she was a fiend, a woman with moles on both cheeks the size of cow’s nipples. She was the local eyesore. But she was also, as everybody well knew, the brains (and the brawn) behind their operation. Louie was owner of Louie’s in name only. It was her place, and she’d lorded over it for more than twenty-five years from her post at the cash register. Then one day something happened, her brain clogged up, and she dragged Louie away, away to die in Arkansas. More bizarre is that she did it in the middle of some of the blackest days anybody’d ever seen. But Rachel, hard as she was, used to wail in her sleep after seeing him in such pain. She read in a pamphlet that the warmer climate and yes, the waters, the miracle thermal baths of Hot Springs, could ease some of the worst of symptoms, the ceaseless trembling, for one. She was a hard woman and maybe hideous to look at, his friends said, but she loved that man without embarrassment, which was more than they could say for their own wives. And though she spent much of their mutual working day berating him for his generosity (whenever she was in the back room, Louie smuggled groceries to people without writing it on a tab), everybody knew she babied him behind the closed doors of their apartment upstairs. She washed him; Louie Shlansky never slept on sheets that weren’t crisp. Rachel decreed it. Hot Springs. And they were going to open that café they talked about when they were first married, those days when their bodies were still young and unravaged. At first he protested: What about Bernice and the babies? And our customers? This block will starve. Is that what you want? To start another potato famine? This is how it started in Ireland. The best people left and then came the fungus.

  She knew losing his audience alone might kill him. But what’s the use of an audience when all you’ve got is soil in your throat? “Imagine the shaking stopping,” she whispered fiercely. “Imagine it.” She stroked his cheek with the inside of her fist. They were in the kitchen. In the gloom of early morning in chill Chicago April. Outside, it looked the gloom of December. It was Sunday and the store would be shut all day in deference to the law, but they’d long made a habit of getting up at 5:45 every morning. He looked at her and didn’t exactly agree; surrendered would be a better word, since it wasn’t, finally, up to him. If she hadn’t shooed him away so she could swamp the floor, he would have told her he was grateful. He so rarely thought of himself, the self he didn’t invent. Strange to think that his comfort was so important you had to pick up and move a house.

  In the kitchen that morning, he didn’t need to tell her he was grateful. She knew. In the ash light, she knew. She also knew that whatever she did, his was a fragile life; the move alone might kill him. But she would never be able to forgive herself for standing pat. Hot Springs. Lucky Luciano and Al Capone went there. Jack Dempsey. George Raft. Eleanor Roosevelt, too. The Illinois Central and the Chicago and Rock Island took the rich down there in sleeping cars. They came from the East Coast and Hollywood to promenade the clean white sidewalks and bathe. Rachel’s pamphlet said that at Hot Springs you were either about to take your bath, taking your bath, or just getting through with your bath. There were stories of cripples walking again, even running, climbing trees, after a day or two in those waters.

  One week before they left, she gave a party in his honor. All of the 800 block of Fargo Avenue crowded into the flat above the store. Louie stood, as usual, inside the circle, his wine sloshing, telling about the time his secondhand zeppelin crashed into the Indian Ocean and he got rescued by a canoe-load of Potawatomi squaws who thought he was handsome and so scalped him for free even though their normal price was $3.50. “It’s why I have no hair,” he said. Rachel stayed in the kitchen, silent.

  Her frivolous daughter, Bernice, the dancer, whirls in, balancing two glasses in each palm. Just had another baby, a daughter, Esther, and now look at her. Already slim and careless. Overdressed as usual tonight. Pearls in a year like this. Can you imagine? Bernice sets the plate and the glasses safely on the table, widens her eyes and implores, again, “This is madness. Look how happy—”

  “What! I die for that man every day and you come here all tarty and—”

  “Nobody else can love him?”

  “How much did you pay for those pearls?”

  “Hot Springs, Mother. You’ll make him a servant. The kind of money people throw around down there, you don’t understand.”

  “I asked you never to speak of money in this house.”

  “I can’t have an opinion. Only you can—”

  “You bring shame.”

  “Traipsing him off to a place he doesn’t know a soul? Him? Who loves nothing more than sitting on the stoop with Manny and Uncle Nort.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “How do you expect him to cook in some restaurant if he can no longer even work the stock
in the store? Anyway, Seymour says he can find a place for him. That he can sit at a desk. He wanted me to tell you.”

  Rachel’s face twitches, but she doesn’t roar. It’s as though she hasn’t heard this most terrible of all suggestions, that she accept her son-in-law’s charity. She looks at her feet and says quietly, even meekly, “The waters. You don’t know about the waters. The radioactivity enlarges the blood vessels. I read it.”

  Bernice, too, looks down at her mother’s battered shoes. She knows she has a better pair in the closet, that she wore these for her, so that Bernice would be certain to see how poor, her struggles…Yet, even so, she can’t help being sucked in a little by her mother’s faith. It’s something she gave up on years ago, and about more things in her life than her father’s health. Nonetheless, it’s her mother. Bernice can’t stop herself from firing: “Your waters are a fraud, Mother, a cover for the gambling. Seymour says it got so bad a few years ago the mayor had to fire the entire police force. He also says everybody there has gonorrhea.”

  “Seymour, Seymour, Seymour. Where’s Seymour, who loves your father so much?”

  “Working, Mother. You know he’d be here if he wasn’t working.”

  “So much love I’m choking.”

  Rachel sits, rests her hand on the kitchen table. Bernice takes a step backward, away from her mother. In the other room, her father booms.

  They drove down there in a truck Manny, the junk dealer, lent them. Manny knew he’d never see it again, but it was the least he could do for Louie. Although even Manny, who’d always been the block’s optimist, couldn’t help thinking it would be more a hearse than a Dodge humpback in no time. Rachel drove. Louie sat beside her and told stories of the first time he laid eyes on her, at that ball at Baron von Rothschild’s summer palace in Venice. How Rachel arrived in a white silk dress on the arm of Napoleon’s other son, Felix, the blind one, the one history books ignore. And me a cobbler’s son from the ghetto in Pilvishki sneaking a peek at you.

  She got the café up and running in ten days. It so happened that a man was selling his place, a first bit of luck that made her think the potion of the waters was already working. Two afternoons a week, sometimes three times, when they had the money, she took him to Bathhouse Row. They went to the Quapaw because it was slightly cheaper than the other houses. It wasn’t nearly as opulent as either the Maurice or the Buckstaff. But even the Quapaw was grander than anything they’d ever known in their lives, and Louie reveled in it. The vapors! The robes, the white towels, the Negro attendants in their impeccable shirts and scratchy bath mitts. Amid all the steam and the whiteness of the porcelain—who’d ever seen such white—he’d descend into the glory of that water. Tiny Louie scrubbed and dried. Louie from Rogers Park rubbed down by masseurs calling him Mister this and Mister that. He’d emerge from those baths a new man, singing the praises of the robber barons. The fat men, the fatter men. Who’d ever seen such obese men? Lord, these thieves know how to live! Bring back Hoover! I take back everything I ever said about their greedy child-killing hands! Hail the captains of industry! Hail the lying tycoons!

  But he got worse. Faster than her worst nightmares foretold. Of course she knew he would, but she’d prayed to God, beseeched God. For once in my life, make me wrong about something.

  Inside of six months in Arkansas, Louie could no longer hold a saucepan. He slept in a little bed in the kitchen by the stove. Rachel would sit in a chair beside the bed and watch him shake in his sleep. All night she’d watch him. She wrote to Bernice: “His body’s too small for this. There isn’t enough room for it and him.” The only person they saw then was an old black man who lived in the basement. His name was Edwin Edwidge, a name that made Louie cackle and call him a liar. Edwin made his living sweeping sidewalks, but mostly, he told them, I’m a widower, which nobody pays me for. He often brought up coffee because he liked to listen to Louie’s stories, and Louie couldn’t get enough of the man because he always guffawed long and hard before a punch line had even entered Louie’s head.

  After she closed the café (she didn’t wait for a buyer, just locked the door, didn’t bother with a sign), they no longer had the money for the Quapaw. So Rachel took him to the government bathhouse, the free one. No velvet between your toes here. No copper tubs, no mosaic domes either. A flat low building, looked as if it was trying to hide. Rachel had never seen a building so ashamed of itself. She bit her lip and cursed God for creating America as she signed the pauper’s oath on Louie’s behalf. The ultimate humiliation of the poor: confessing it to a sneering clerk. She could have spit on his nose. And she’d wait outside on a wooden bench and watch the line that never slacked: shriekers, moaners, asthmatics, syphilitics, cripples, lepers. They dragged their feet across the sidewalk, they murmured to nobody. The parade of lunatics disgusted her. Rachel knew they couldn’t help what had seized them, and yet she half believed what people sometimes said, that these unfortunates were paying for something. She didn’t believe the quack about them being punished for crimes in a past life. No, something they did in this life had made every breath a hell on earth. She tried to close her eyes on them, but even in her own darkness she watched the parade shuffle by. Now my Louie joins their ranks.

  She’d walk him home as he shivered, wrapped in blankets that dragged across the ground. He no longer tried to speak with his mouth—only with his eyes, and even they were exhausted. Just the two of them then, except for Edwin, who would come up and read Louie the newspaper. Rachel ordered him to read only the good news. This never took very long. After that, the three of them would sit for hours in the silence of Louie not being able to talk.

  Finally a doctor at the Army-Navy Hospital told Rachel there was an operation he could try, a new procedure where you fixed one side and then the other, but the chances are fifty to one our old boy won’t make it. Of course, on the other side of the coin, the doctor said. An awful slow goodbye.

  Then—and this is the part people back home insisted for years that even Louie Shlansky, Fargo Avenue’s greatest prevaricator, couldn’t have cooked up with a straight face—she left him there. Abandoned him in Hot Springs, right there at the Army-Navy Hospital. The legend goes further: the woman drove back to Chicago in Manny Epstein’s truck, alone.

  The Como Hotel

  Central Avenue, Hot Springs, Arkansas

  5/25/40

  Dear Seymour,

  I spoke with Dr. Klemme today and he said he was coming along as good as could be expected under the circumstances—but that he’s not “out of the woods just yet.” He’s doesn’t know if Daddy’s heart will able to stand this—only time will tell—that is the next 24 to 48 hours. He hasn’t woken up yet to see she’s not here. Of course you know that if he pulls through this he has to go through the same thing on the other side in two months. There is a man in the next bed who was operated on about ten days ago—but he’s only had one side done so far. He’s coming along fine, but he cries all the time because his nervous system is so upset. Of course there was another man who had the same operation about a week ago and he passed away the other night. He never came out of it at all. How are my two loves? Do they miss me? I miss them terribly. Make sure they make doody every day, and please be as much help to Mother as you can. I know she’s never easy, but do try. Well, my mind is quite a muddle. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. This being away from each other may help us—who knows? Because you know what we do, Seymour? I watch my father die and I know. We squander. Write to me care of the Como Hotel.

  All my love, B

  Bernice brought his body home on the Ann Rutledge. A train named after Abraham Lincoln’s girlfriend, a fact that would have sent her father into a convulsion of hosannas: You see, gentlemen, it was Mary Todd who poisoned Ann’s venison. This was in 1863. I was Assistant Secretary of War, and yes, I signed the confession. But hear this! Countrymen! Romans! Ukrainians! I did it because the President asked me to—for the good of the country—and his marriage. How
would it have looked? Mary Todd dragged away in shackles? Abe would have rather boxed a thousand Stonewall Jacksons than half a Mary Todd. It was I, I, Louie the First of Fargo Avenue, Rogers Park, who also saved the union.

  Her mother never explained herself, and after a while Bernice stopped asking. Seymour said it was simple, that there was no mystery, that grief just undid already-loosened screws. Why dwell on it, Bernice? Leave her be. Why must you always dwell? They gave her the tiny guest room in the house on Lunt. Olivia carried her meals up there and listened to her. Rachel never spoke of the past, only the present. She talked of the way the light looked outside her window and of the temperature, how the cold felt on her arms. For two decades she rarely went out in the street. Philip was afraid of her; Esther told her friends that Grandma Rachel smelled like a wet raccoon. One day, in 1956, she finished her soup and died.

  Bernice watches the February sun retreat from the bay window that looks out upon the slope of the ravine and the skeletal winter trees. The new house so huge and still around her, she can’t help feeling like an intruder in its silence. And what kind of house is this if her mother doesn’t live upstairs?

  The vision appears slowly in the gray doom of the enormous window. It’s a kitchen in Arkansas. A room she saw for less than an hour, so long ago now it happened to someone else, when she went to retrieve the papers, the photographs, the little furniture left to salvage. The sad black man who answered the door and didn’t move his head when she told him the news. The dirty kitchen walls and the chair by the soiled bed. The filth. The filth is what startled her the most, that her mother had let it all go—