Orrie's Story

by Thomas Berger

  After three and a half years, he was prosperous relative to what he had been hitherto, and he had found a good woman as well, though she was in years but a girl, having left school as soon as she was legally able to do so, to work in the same plant as his, wearing women’s powder-blue overalls and hair tied up in a Rosie-the-Riveter kerchief. Augie had met her in the company lunchroom when an apple she dropped rolled right up to his heavy work shoes.

  Though her hair and blue eyes were reminiscent of Gena’s, in character Cassie could not have been more sensibly down-to-earth. She too had accumulated savings and rapidly was overtaking him though having started work later than he and not receiving wages as high. But her expenses were almost nil, her parents refusing to accept more for room and board than twenty dollars a month and taking that only because Cassie threatened to move out if they did not. Like them a devout churchgoer, she neither drank nor smoked and was not supposed to dance but was sometimes prevailed upon to do so by Augie, not someplace in public where they might be seen, but in her own home, to radio music, when her parents were out. Even so, it bothered her conscience to be doing a sinful thing in their own domicile, behind their backs, and it took all the feeling she had for Augie to gratify him in this way, which aside from some closed-mouth kissing was the extent of their physical association. In the earliest phase of their friendship he once tried to touch her clothed breasts but had been so decisively rebuffed that he never even attempted anything below her waist.

  Here he was, more than forty, father of three, married to a whore, in love with a nineteen-year-old virgin with whom he had no fleshly connection. He sometimes thought about the possible absurdity of the situation but never questioned the rightness of it for his peculiar wants. Cassie was the perfect antidote to Esther. And beneath that truth was the more plangent reference to Gena. He could only pray that his daughter had not, wherever she was, come to grief, that she had a lover as kind and gentle and fatherly as Cassie’s.

  With great trepidation, he had, in the old-fashioned way that seemed appropriate, asked Cassie’s father for her hand before applying to the girl herself, and Mr. Pryor, a truck mechanic who had not gone to high school, assented eagerly, seeing Augie as a sound man and a step upward in culture, and asked no uncomfortable questions. When Augie did propose to Cassie, he was already furnished with a ring as well as a plan for their future together: using their combined nest eggs they would take a mortgage on a little house in the same neighborhood in which she had lived all her life, or as near as possible. Two bedrooms would do, one for them and the other as a nursery for the children. For his part, he would give up the drinking of any liquid containing alcohol, but (with a squeeze of the hand and a wink) he probably would like a slow waltz with his wife now and again, with the shades lowered if necessary.

  “Why,” Cassie said in the accent that never failed to make him melt, “thin everbody’d know we were up to no good.” But her eyes were moist, and her betrothal kiss was the sweetest he had ever had.

  Not once did either she or, in his presence anyway, her parents refer to the marked difference in ages, though Augie himself was wont to mention it frequently, if only to be reassured, for he could count on Cassie’s absolute moral support. Never before had he known a woman he could rely on. He had had to live four decades to apprehend the basic truth that a man could not go it alone. Neither could he survive if he were in an alliance with a bitter enemy—as only now could he admit Esther had been for most of their marriage, and had he not finally proved man enough to leave, he would still be helplessly serving as the object of her scorn.

  Whenever he thought about that matter he sent home another bogus account of an exploit of his in combat, taken either from soldiers he met in a bar where he still drank an occasional beer when Cassie was otherwise occupied, or from a current movie, though he was careful not to plagiarize the latter too literally, should Esther have seen the same picture, especially if it starred one of her favorite actors in a characteristic role: the cocky near-rascal who begins, owing to his exaggerated self-regard, without the sympathy of much of the audience but claims more and more of it as the film proceeds and then finally conquers all resistance by a demonstration of his readiness to lay his life on the line for the very comrades he had earlier upstaged.

  The obvious problem was how to explain the domestic postmark and conventional three-cent stamp, on letters that were ostensibly mailed from foreign battlefields. At first this had appeared insuperable. To maintain such an imposture could simply not be done. But in his new life it had become routine for new possibilities to manifest themselves almost by magic. The letters to Esther need not be frequent, and the same was true of the messages, often on postcards, that he sent the gang at the Idle Hour. During the months of silence, then, he could be at the front, where the action was too heavy to permit even the scribbling on a V-mail form. In the intervals between these combat tours, he and his elite unit were flown back Stateside for a recharge of batteries. Any- body could understand that: thus his U.S. address.

  And in fact, Esther had had no questions, dropping him a line only when the allotment was a few days late. He had phoned her but twice since he left: first, not long after leaving, and having been blamed so hatefully for Gena’s disappearance on that occasion, he never called again until, four years later, he was about to return to say goodbye forever.

  As to the gang at the bar, they were not on the alert to catch out a friend in a major lie, though any of them might be skeptical of something petty, like the length of a fish that broke the line and swam away before it could be netted, or the alleged sex appeal of one of the bachelors.

  As far as Cassie was aware, Augie had never been married. Much of her value to him was in such an innocent approach to life, some of which was due to youth and lack of experience, but not all, not even most. He believed that she would be ignorant of certain things her life long, owing to a natural purity of heart, an inability to suspect the motives of another human being. For example, the supposedly blind man, with his cup of pencils, they encountered on an afternoon in the city: when Augie pointed out that after such people died, bankbooks were often found in their effects, listing sizable assets, Cassie could not begin to understand the implications thereof. How then would it have been possible to put his own history into terms that would have been intelligible to her?

  Fortunately, she displayed little curiosity about how he had lived before they met. No doubt this was because she could not picture him in another existence, for she was utterly deficient in imagination of the common sort—another difference between her and Gena: Cassie had no dreams of Hollywood or any other place or milieu than that in which she had lived and expected to live until her death, at which time she would be buried near all the relatives who had preceded her. But if in this, her great strength, she was clearsighted, levelheaded, and stanch, she was also superstitious in the extreme, and not only as to all routine phenomena shared with the herd, the number 13, black cats, cracks in the sidewalk, open umbrellas indoors, but also some things peculiar to herself, products of the vivid dreams she experienced several times per month, not of the common sort, not mere wish-fulfillment like so many of Augie’s (in which he invariably received large amounts of unearned money), nor the common nightmares he suffered once or twice a year, but rather visions of events to come in real life. Perhaps these, in the economy of existence, compensated for her lack of fancy when awake. In any event, they were not to be taken seriously as prefigurings of the future, for they always proved either at odds with what finally occurred or too vague for particular application. In a global war disasters were common enough. That Cassie claimed success in predicting a kamikaze attack on a U.S. battleship in the Philippine Sea, half a world away, because three days before, she had dreamed of fire falling from the sky, was the sort of idiosyncrasy in which she could be indulged if you loved her, as did her parents, who had heard its like ever since she entered adolescence and had survived several of her predictions of domestic d
oom by simply ignoring them, and of course Augie, who had taken pleasure as a boy in defying superstition, deriding Erie for cowering at home on Fridays the 13th and always walking under a ladder when he found one.

  If Cassie saw in a dream that an outdoor picnic would come to grief by way of flood (though there was no body of water near their place of choice), Augie was pleased to eat the chicken leg in a stifling kitchen, just as he washed it down with oversweetened ice tea rather than the cold beer he preferred. You made such sacrifices when you loved somebody. Unless the auguries were favorable you passed up ballgames, evenings of bowling, afternoon walks, and other such minor pleasures, because you consistently enjoyed the major rewards of love, which concerned not the senses but rather the soul.

  There was nothing else about Cassie that could be called a foible. Her fidelity went without saying. She had had little enough to do with the opposite sex even before Augie’s day. Now, with no urging from him (though he was certainly not offended), she interpreted the state of engagement as being one in which she looked no other male, except her father, straight in the eye, and conversed with none unless it concerned work at the plant. Aside from the board paid to her folks, she saved all her money for the marriage to come. She embraced Augie’s opinions, when he had such, and when he had none, as in the area of religion, she continued to practice her own faith without demanding that he join her. Even after meeting him, her best idea for Saturday recreation remained baking several loaves of raisin bread. An accomplished seamstress, she made much of the clothing she wore.

  Cassie readily assented to her fiancé’s schedule for the wedding, which of course would be in her church, she in white, but not take place till the war was over. In her naive way she accepted the patriotic argument—Augie couldn’t take her off the assembly line to make babies instead until the peace had been won—but his private motive was a matter of personal responsibility and honor. A living hero did not come home before the enemy had been defeated. He would meanwhile continue to send Esther the monthly payment. But as soon as the war ended, he would return to his wife only to see her face when he said goodbye forever. Naturally he would miss the children, but his feeling for them must ever, unfortunately, be conditioned by his memory of their mother and her unceasing efforts to unman him. All his hopes now were with the brand-new family he would create with Cassie.

  With the second atomic bomb the conflict was over at last, and here he was, back at the Idle Hour, where he could smile at Rickie Wicks’s remarking it was (aside from a gray hair or two) as if he never left, for on the contrary it was as different as anything could be: he had left a failure, returned in triumph. Already he no longer felt uncomfortable in the decorated uniform into which he had changed in a toilet booth at the bus depot. He had not worn it during the trip lest other soldiers try to strike up conversations, which might have proved embarrassing, though the details at his command were sufficient to bluff civilians: e.g., the Purple Heart was for a wound he got from 88-shrapnel, couldn’t show it because it had come too damned close to changing his voice; won the Silver Star at the Bulge, Xmastime there in the snowbound Ardennes, encircled by Krauts. In his cards to the Idle Hour he had claimed a part in the liberation of Paris and then, a year later, also in the occupation of Berlin, for who of the old gang was in a position to doubt him?

  Augie was drunk by the time they all went into the back room for lunch, and throughout the meal he continued to drink, not beers after the first one but, given the occasion and that his tab was on the house, Canadian Club, which went down like sweet cream, all to the good because the steak was quite tough and the onions glistened with grease. He had been spoiled by Sunday dinners prepared by Cassie’s mother, assisted in every phase by his intended.

  The welcome-home cake was awfully nice as a gesture but it was dry and the icing tasted as though the butter had been skimped on. Also, after a couple of hours of these old pals, swell guys though they were, Augie began to wonder how, before the war, he could have endured their company…. The answer of course was Esther. He had had to go somewhere, have some companionship, home being unbearable after the kids went to bed and the evening stretched bleakly before him. But by now, with the best will in the world, he could find little in common with these fellows. The old times had not been good ones for him, unless you went back far enough, to before his marriage, but to reminisce of a happy boy- and young-manhood was depressing in the extreme, for any such memories proceeded inevitably towards what had followed.

  It would have helped had he been able to reveal the new state of affairs in his life—the real one as opposed to the lies about the war—but that could not be done without possibly compromising his situation. Brazen adultress that she was, Esther was capable of making trouble if she knew of the existence of Cassie and even more if she was aware of the war bonds he had accumulated in four years at the plant. The job would probably soon be at an end. He would have to look for work elsewhere, and the pickings might be slim as the adjustment to peacetime was being established.

  All Esther had to be told was that he wanted a divorce, on any grounds that suited her, even if he was legally to take the blame. She could keep their joint possessions, furniture and the like. The house she and the children occupied was rented from his cousin Erie. Augie had lost the previous place when he couldn’t meet the mortgage payments and the bank foreclosed.

  The guys at the homecoming lunch knew all these unhappy facts, but being real friends, never had made the slightest allusion to any even in the prewar time, before he had redeemed himself as a combat hero. Suddenly he felt guilty about being bored in their company. They were the brothers he never had. The alternative was Erie, always a rat and a sneak as far back as could be remembered.

  “Hey, this has been terrific,” Augie said now, pushing his chair away from the long table that had been formed by moving several small ones together. “But what time’s it getting to be?”

  “Have a cigar,” said Bob Terwillen, sliding the cellophane-wrapped green cylinder past Rickie Wicks, but it was halted by moisture on the tabletop.

  When the cigar had been pushed the rest of the way to him, Augie stuck it in one of the upper pockets of the officer’s jacket, unbuttoning the brass button to do so. He had given up cigarettes for Cassie’s sake and had never used cigars, but did not want to hurt a friend’s feelings.

  Of those assembled, Joe Becker was the one he had known longest, ever since they were little kids and the Beckers lived nearby. He and Joe built a lean-to in the woods and slept under it once in a while on summer nights, but never succeeded in weaving the leaves tightly enough to shed water in a heavy rain though it would withstand a mild sprinkle. At home Joe had bored a little gimlet hole through the back wall of his closet, through which you could peep into the bathroom, and if the closet door there was partially open (this had to be arranged beforehand by hanging a heavy robe on the inside hook, so that the door would not close properly), you could spy on someone sitting on the toilet. By that means, Augie had seen, on Joe’s older sister, the first female genital hair of his life. Joe would watch his own sisters through the hole: this seemed weird to Augie, but then he had no sisters.

  Now, back here, far from Cassie and her parents, he felt absolutely alone. It was ironic that the welcome-home lunch had evoked this feeling. His morale might well have been higher had his return been ignored and he been permitted to maintain the stern resolve with which he had set out on the mission. To face up to Esther after all this approbation by his old pals would be harder than ever. Never had he drunk this much in the middle of the day. He was both so exhausted he could hardly keep his eyes open and jumping with nerves to the degree that he knew he could not go to sleep if given the chance.

  Joe Becker waited behind him in the little men’s room as he used the lone urinal. There was no room for anyone else.

  “Aug, you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He expected nothing to happen when he pushed the lever but was surprised to see a vigorous
gush of water: they had finally got that fixed.

  “If you come in here with your valise, then you ain’t been home yet.” Becker had fallen into the ungrammatical speech of their boyhood, when they believed he-men spurned schoolteacher niceties of diction.

  Augie was moved by the gesture of intimacy. “That’s right.” Having worked the flusher once more, he turned around. “I’m heading there now…. How’s everything at your house? How’s Pauline?”

  “Good, great,” said Becker. “Look, Aug, I really hate to get into anything like this, which might not be any of my business, but hell’s bells, you and me go back such a long way…”

  Having closed his fly, Augie fastened the lowest button on the skirt of the tunic and tightened his belt. In this attire he felt he really could have been as good an officer as any man alive. “I got nothin’ to learn about Esther and Erie, if that’s what you mean. I’m going up there and call it quits for good.”

  Becker stared into his face for a moment and then clapped him on the upper arm. “Good for you, pal. I won’t ever mention the subject again. But listen, whyn’t you go over to my place for a little nap first? I’ll give you the key. I got to go back to work, and Pauline’s at the hospital, so you won’t be bothered.”