by Peter Orner
In the window her mother, barefoot and in a loose house-dress, hovers over the bed. Her father is so shriveled under the blankets, his body is nothing more than a small lump. He’s wearing a hat, a brown derby, that swallows his head. Bernice can’t see his face. She watches her mother lean closer and sees everything. Her mother’s bare feet, the grease-smudged walls, the cloudy window above the stove with its crack, a yellow fissure in the upper right corner. The lump that is her father, that hat. Feels her father’s soft wheeze in the hollow of her mother’s throat. Tell me something, Louie, a lie, a bamboozle. Anything. Her mother waits.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the James Michener–Copernicus Society of America and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa for a generous fellowship, as well as Rhoda Pierce, Rob Preskill, and Dantia MacDonald for immeasurable faith and support.
In 2013: Thanks to two legends of publishing, agent Ellen Levine and editor Pat Strachan, for, among so many other things, helping this book to see the light of day, again.
And to Ricardo Duranti, great Italian translator and dear friend. Il prossimo anno a Mompeo.
About the Author
Peter Orner is the author of the acclaimed books Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. Orner is also the editor of two books of oral history, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Orner was born in Chicago and now lives in San Francisco.
Also by Peter Orner
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Love and Shame and Love
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
As Editor
Underground America
Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean
Lives (coeditor, Annie Holmes)
Look for these other books by Peter Orner
Love and Shame and Love
“Beautiful.…Think Saul Bellow (Chicago setting, rollicking Jewish-style comedy) mated with Chekhov (unassuming, devastating detail), set to the twangy thump of early Tom Petty.…Orner is the rare sort of writer who not only exactingly paints life’s bewilderments and suffering, but induces the experience itself in the reading.”
—Ted Weesner Jr., Boston Sunday Globe
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
“This novel, about a white American teacher in Namibia, has the same sort of episodic structure, lyrical prose, and completely hypnotic effect as the novels of Michael Ondaatje.…It’s a gorgeously written book, very funny, and bursting with soul.”
—Dave Eggers, The Guardian
Back Bay Books • Available wherever paperbacks are sold
Acclaim for Peter Orner’s
Esther Stories
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner, Rome Fellowship in Literature from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Winner, Samuel Goldberg & Sons Foundation Prize from the Foundation for Jewish Culture
Finalist, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
Finalist, Young Lions Fiction Award,
New York Public Library
A Book of the Year, selected by Alan Cheuse,
All Things Considered, National Public Radio
“Like Amy Bloom and Charles Baxter, Orner has a gift for revealing how the tragic and the mundane occupy equal berths in our limited mental space.…Because Orner is constantly adjusting the aperture on his writing, Esther Stories compresses a magnificent range of detail into a small amount of space.…With an elegant, understated intelligence, Esther Stories illuminates how even the most heroic family tales can molder and darken with time.” —John Freeman, Chicago Tribune
“The subtle arc of these stories, moving through several years and conflicting points of view, achieves an elegiac tone, even as Orner renders the details of family intimacy with sweet precision: the old matriarch who, one day in 1956, ‘finished her soup and died’; the family failure, whose black sheep status was confirmed forever when ‘he sired only daughters.’”
—Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe
“There’s startling intimacy in every story of Peter Orner’s debut collection, Esther Stories—startling because of the immediacy with which Orner’s characters confront us and because of the range of feelings they express and the secrets they reveal.…Orner’s range of subjects and characters is as impressive as the depths of his sympathies.…Peter Orner is that rare find: a young writer who can inhabit any character, traverse any landscape, and yet never stray from the sound of the human heart.”
—Judy Doenges, Washington Post Book World
“These are stories of unusual delicacy and beauty, and this is a remarkable collection.”—Charles Baxter
“These stories go from fragmentary to big novella-length investigations of family (there’s a brilliant section about a family in Fall River, Mass., Lizzie Borden’s hometown), and they feature unusual points of view, strange narrative structures, and lots of compassion. I wish my first book had been this good. I suspect that if Orner proves as successful with the novel as with the short story, we’re going to hear a lot about him. If he remains a writer in the short-story miniature mode, he’s going to be one on the scale of Grace Paley or Lydia Davis, I imagine. I was stunned by a sentence or two in every one of the works in Esther Stories.”
—Rick Moody, Hartford Courant
“Esther Stories is a rare and original collection.”—Joan Silber
“There’s a strange, elegant grace to Peter Orner’s short stories, a characteristic rarely found in such a debut. Orner writes like a wise old soul, re-creating the past and its people with skill and apparent ease.…Sometimes he speaks softly, but you’ll never forget what he says.”—Connie Ogle, Miami Herald
“Taken individually, these precise, poetic stories have a spare and haunting wisdom. But taken as a whole, Esther Stories is like a dreamscape—the small ache in your soul is balanced by a luminous compassion for all the beauty, love, and folly that comprise the human condition. If the short story was in need of a future, it has been found in Peter Orner.”—Dennis Lehane
“You can see why the stories might be dangerous. They are sharp and frequently without mercy. Lives often boil down to a pile of clothes or worse, explode in the sudden violence of long-repressed pain.…In the story ‘Esther Stories,’ the narrator swirls through his aunt Esther’s fall from beauty to misery like a conjurer, like a wizard flipping through images in a crystal ball. And the slightly blurred edges don’t make this story any less brutal.”—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“A spirit of passionate tenderness broods over these stories. It is as if love, transcending itself, has become a wisdom so perfect it must cherish everything—grace, of course, and awkwardness too, and innocence, and guilt, and haplessness. And, yes, clear-sighted and unhonored loss.”—Marilynne Robinson
“Orner doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls…but all would be in vain were it not for Orner’s mastery of language. He moves, seemingly effortlessly, between plain speech and more elevated diction, between short, flat sentences and sinuous, long ones.…Best of all, Orner is a true democrat…every character, young or old, well-to-do or broke, maimed or whole, is worthy of the author’s insight and eloquence…brooding, mysterious, ineffable, beautiful.”
—Margot Livesey, New York Times Book Review
“Orner shows a deft touch for evoking domestic discontent and less often, domestic triumph…charged with poignance…an impressive collection.”—Dan Cryer, Newsday
“Orner’s finest treatment of his grandfather’s storytelling legacy turns up in a story called ‘Walt Kaplan Reads Hiroshima, March 1947.’ In it, a 4-F former air-raid warden sits down with John Hersey’s Hiroshima and finds himself utterly unstrung by what he finds there.…By now Orner’s left himself completely out of the matter, and the result may just b
e the gem of an already very distinguished collection. It’s the story some of us have waited a lifetime to read—that of a reader’s page-by-page encounter with a book, and of the change it makes in him. One might think the annals of literature would be filled with stories on a theme presumably so dear to writers everywhere, but for some reason that hasn’t been the case. This leaves the field to Orner, and does he ever make it bloom.”
—David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
“Some of Orner’s very short stories are the best of that form that I have read since Isaac Babel’s.”—Andre Dubus
“Although many of the stories in Peter Orner’s first collection of short fiction are only a few pages long, their emotional breadth is extensive, as is their geographical range.…Subtle and leisurely, many of the stories echo the stately despair of Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell’s classic 1959 novel.”
—Donna Rifkind, Baltimore Sun
“Esther Stories marks the debut of a major talent.…Orner’s shortest pieces run only a paragraph, while his title story fills out thirty pages.…All reveal him to be a writer of impressive thematic, geographical, and generational range. To excerpt a sentence or two here would be to dismember. His stories deserve, and need, to be read in full.”
—Jae Won Chung, Philadelphia City Paper
“In my opinion, Orner’s stories could be used as near-perfect examples of how much a few words can convey. He is also a master at endings, never closing the story shut but wrapping up just enough to leave you satisfied. There is so much more here to talk about, but by far the best thing is to get hold of this book and experience it for yourself.”
—Tania Hershman, The Short Review (UK)
“That’s not despair talking, but good old Jewish rakhmones. ‘Sorry’ reminds us that there are those out there who need our compassion. There is ‘sorry’ in Orner’s beautiful tales, as well as grace and luminous poignancy.”
—Debra Darvick, The Forward
“Peter Orner is already a master of very short stories and of longer, highly detailed chronicles of families and relationships, bringing his readers into their world with his tender and passionate prose. Whether taking on a man who ponders ‘what you wish for and can never have’ or a woman who grieves ‘enough for everybody,’ Orner constructs worlds of violence and madness, guilt and innocence, and love and grace. In all his short stories, Orner illuminates one of the most elemental principles of fiction—making what is known uncommon and arresting.”
—Citation for the Hemingway Foundation/
PEN Award (finalist)
“Orner is a master of time: many of the stories in this collection are no more than three pages long, but they can span a moment, an afternoon, or half a lifetime. Orner’s gift is for knowing the one irreconcilable fact of a character—the lone hope, grief, obsession, or prayer that became that character’s fate.”
—Lacy Crawford, Narrative
“This extraordinarily fine collection should establish Orner as a new star of American short fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Peter Orner’s very moving fiction collection, Esther Stories, presents us with lives viewed through a lens that defaults to close-up. They delicately reveal the gossamer-thin webbing that attaches us to our histories and to one another. Humane, subtle, and startling in their understatement, they have been carefully built, sentence by sentence, until ordinary lives become transcendent.”
—Citation for the Rome Prize from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2001 by Peter Orner
Foreword copyright © 2013 by Marilynne Robinson
Cover design by Kapo Ng
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes),
prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Originally published by Mariner Books, November 2001
First ebook edition: April 2013
The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the following publications, where some of these stories first appeared in slightly different form: Atlantic Monthly (“The Raft”); Atlantic Unbound (“The House on Lunt Avenue”); Confrontation (“Daughters”); Cream City Review (“Country Road G” and “At the Motel Rainbow”); Denver Quarterly (“In the Walls”); Epoch (“Shoe Story” and “Providence”); North American Review (“Cousin Tuck’s,” “Sitting Theodore,” and “Two Poes”); Passages North (“Papa Gino’s”); Michigan Quarterly Review (“Walt Kaplan Reads Hiroshima, March 1947”); Oxford Review (“Thumbs”); Southern Review (“Melba Kuperschmid Returns” and “Initials Etched on a Dining-Room Table, Lockeport, Nova Scotia”); Yankee (“Awnings, Bedspreads, Combed Yarns”). “In the Walls” also appeared in a limited-edition collection called Seep (Sierras Press, 1998). “The Raft” was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2001 and “Melba Kuperschmid Returns” in The Pushcart Prize XXVI.
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ISBN: 978-0-316-22469-7
Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
1. What Remains
Initials Etched on a Dining-Room Table, Lockeport, Nova Scotia
Thumbs
In the Walls
Early November
Pile of Clothes
Papa Gino’s
On a Bridge over the Homochitto
2. The Famous
Cousin Tuck’s
Two Poes
Shoe Story
Thursday Night at the Gopher Hole, April 1992
County Road G
At the Motel Rainbow
Sitting Theodore
3. Fall River Marriage
At Horseneck Beach
Sarah
Walt Kaplan Reads Hiroshima, March 1947
Melba Kuperschmid Returns
Birth of a Son-in-Law
At the Conrad Hilton
Awnings, Bedspreads, Combed Yarns
High Priest at the Gates
In the Dark
Atlantic City
Providence
4. The Waters
Michigan City, Indiana
The Raft
The House on Lunt Avenue
Daughters
My Father in an Elevator with Anita Fanska, August 1976
Seymour
The Moraine on the Lake
Esther Stories
The Waters
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Peter Orner
Acclaim for Peter Orner’s Esther Stories
&n
bsp; Newsletters
Copyright