Orrie's Story

by Thomas Berger

  “Okay,” Esther said to E.G. “You can stop pretending.” She had begun to feel the bruises she had received in the struggle to hold Augie under water, to which she had been anesthetic at the time. No doubt the victim’s body would show more. “Any marks on him,” she told E.G., who was now rising, “got there when we had to pull him out to try to save his life.” She sought E.G.’s eyes. “We’ve got nothing to fear. It’ll take them a while to get here and set up the pulmotor. By then he’ll be beyond reviving.”

  E.G. emitted a little groan that was reminiscent of Augie’s last sound. “Oh, he’s gone all right.”

  Esther thought of something. “Here,” she said urgently. “Look through his pants pockets.” She took the uniform trousers from the knob of the closet door and gave them to E.G. and herself began to search through the tunic.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He found the wallet. “You don’t mean take his money?”

  “It won’t be that much. Any pictures of his chippy? Name and address? We ought to notify her, so she won’t come looking for him.”

  “There’s a return bus ticket,” said E.G., “and twelve dollars. Driver’s license—it’s expired.” He lifted his arms as if in supplication. “Nothing else…Jesus, it’s one thing to do the other, but to go through his pockets makes me feel cheap.”

  “Put the wallet back,” said Esther. “They’ll be here before you know it.”

  5

  The members of the lifesaving squad were drawn from the ranks of the local volunteer firemen and included one of Augie’s friends who had been at the welcome-home party. Despite his thick eyeglasses, Bob Terwillen served as both firefighter and lifesaver and in fact had at special times (such as carnivals) even been an auxiliary cop.

  Terwillen had never gone to war but death was not an unprecedented sight to him. Fellow townsfolk now and again drowned or were accidentally electrocuted, and at least once in his experience there had been a local suicide-by-auto-exhaust. The squad was usually called in if there seemed any hope for resuscitation in such cases. Though all its members were employed locally, some worked on different shifts from others, so that part of the complement at any given time was available on the shortest notice. Those in bed kept their clothing nearby. But the men working in the factory, if they could hear the steam whistle that sounded the appropriate code identifying the part of town in which the emergency could be located (not always possible in the din), were almost as prompt to get where directed, which might be close enough to walk. Once in the proper quarter of town, you listened and looked for the ambulance, which was driven by Mel Furman, who kept it in one side of his large garage and could get behind its wheel within four minutes of the phone-call alert, less if the time was before he had gone to bed, for he worked out of the same garage, at auto repair.

  Not everybody for whom the lifesavers were summoned died. In fact death was far and away the exception. Occasionally the squad really saved someone’s life by its actions. At other times the men arrived to find their services unneeded—the subject was breathing again either by reason of God’s help or interim first-aid measures taken by nearby loved ones. And then false alarms, sounded by the panicky, were not unknown.

  Though having considered himself a friend of Augie Mencken’s, Terwillen had never been in his home before; in fact, though in such a small town everybody knew where everyone else lived in an approximate way, he could not have identified the particular house as being Augie’s, and the dispatcher (the police chief’s wife) had not got a name from the individual who called in. So Terwillen had no idea of the identity of the victim until, with the other fellows, helping to carry the heavy pulmotor, he climbed the front steps, crossed the porch, and entered the front hallway, there encountering an urgent Esther Mencken, in a garment that was dripping wet.

  “Upstairs, first door on the left,” said she to Mel Furman, the leader of the squad. “Bathroom, fan fell on his head, passed out in tub. We gave him artificial respiration, but I# think he was too far gone.”

  In the bathroom, the others got to the body before Terwillen did, and for a moment blocked his view of the head and trunk. He could see only the more pitiful half of the naked corpse, with the splayed feet and the skinny white shins and defenseless private parts.

  From the edge of the closet door hung the beribboned officer’s tunic. Protruding from the left chest pocket, erect against the decorations there, was the cigar he had given Augie not an hour earlier.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “No. This can’t be. I just left him at the party.” The others were silently going about what was necessary to get the pulmotor going: that was their job, they were not licensed to certify death, they would try to revive the body while one of them, Red Mercer, ran downstairs to phone the doctor on call for such emergencies.

  Ordinarily Terwillen was capable of discharging his responsibilities, but he was useless at the moment, inconsolable, though he had not laid eyes on Augie nor heard from him in a personal way for four years. It was the injustice! To survive four years of combat unscathed, come back, and within hours drown in the quiet home tub, while family members waited unwittingly just outside the door.

  Terwillen could not endure the bathroom. He left and wandered distraught along the hallway, passing several rolls of toilet paper in a stack against the wall. Through the open doorway of one room he saw a young girl sitting on the edge of a bed, her face in her hands. He knew Augie had several children but would have recognized none by sight in the absence of a parent.

  He trudged to her. “Honey,” he said, and when she lowered her hands to look at him, eyes streaming, he began himself to weep, had to remove his glasses, which meant he was almost blind.

  He offered her his clean handkerchief, but she did not take it, so he finally brought it to his own tears. With the specs back in place, he could discern that, though so thin and pale, the reddened blue eyes providing the only color, her face showed a marked resemblance to her father’s. “Honey,” he asked, “what’s your name?”

  “Ellie.”

  He sat down alongside her, the bed sagging, and put his arm around her narrow shoulders. “Ellie, honey, I’m Bob Terwillen. I was one of your dad’s closest friends.” Without warning, he was shaken by a profound sob and gripped her more tightly. “This is a terrible accident. He was just at a party we gave him at the restaurant, not an hour ago. Oh, it’s just awful. Oh, honey.”

  Ellie’s body stiffened in his grasp. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve on her free arm. “It wasn’t any accident,” she said quietly, almost gently. And then escaped from him, stood up, went to the dresser and put on a pair of glasses of her own. Her eyes no longer seemed so pathetic. Still speaking in a low voice but now with ferocity, she said, “They killed him.”

  “Oh, honey,” Terwillen repeated. “It’s awful enough. Don’t say things you don’t mean.”

  Ellie was a skinny, white-faced young girl in rumpled clothing, her eyeglasses mended with dirty adhesive tape, but the hatred gave her remarkable presence. “They’re murderers,” she said.

  Terwillen almost wailed in exasperation. “Who? There’s nobody home but your mom.” He assumed the girl, overwrought, was babbling nonsensically, and he rose and went back down the hall.

  Esther Mencken had come upstairs by now. The noise of the working pulmotor could be heard from the bathroom.

  She asked him, “Do you think there’s a chance?”

  Against the light from the window on the landing, she seemed to be wearing nothing under the damp housecoat. In his current state Terwillen found this repulsive.

  “You can always hope,” said he and then, suddenly remembering what she had stated on their arrival, “You said ‘we’ gave him artificial respiration. Was somebody else here?”

  “E.G.,” said Esther. “He’s still downstairs. He’s in bad shape: he tried so hard, I think he hurt himself.”

  PART II

  1

 
To some, it did not seem right to drink alcoholic beverages in view of what had happened to Augie Mencken not an hour after the welcome-home party, and Rickie Wicks and Bob Terwillen had coffee as they sat at the bar in the Idle Hour on the evening of the day after the accident. But Al Hagman saw no disrespect in drinking his usual brew, and Joe Becker, who had been closest of all to Augie, was on boilermakers. Joe was taking it hardest of all, to the point that he was being disagreeable to the others.

  “That’s crap,” he belligerently told Wicks. “You think not having a beer will bring Augie back?”

  Rickie diplomatically stayed silent, but Bob Terwillen spoke up. He after all had the authority of having been at the scene with the lifesaving squad. “No, any more than getting drunk will bring him back.”

  “If you mean me,” said Joe, glaring at him, “be man enough to say so, and I’ll be glad to step outside and give you satisfaction.”

  “For Christsake, Joe,” said Herm, brandishing his wet rag.

  “You think Augie would want his pals to get into a fight before he’s even put in the ground?”

  Molly and Gladys were in place at the end of the bar. Molly now spoke up. “She’s not going to bury him. She’s going to cremate him.”

  This regrettable news diverted the men from the developing squabble.

  “How do you know that?” asked Al Hagman.

  “Sue Ann DeMarco,” Molly said smugly, referring to the local beautician. “Bingman uses her to make up the faces on the bodies he embalms. But he’s not going to have any work done on Augie Mencken. Closed casket, then immediate cremation. He’ll be late in getting the body. They have to do a postmortem in case of an accident like that.”

  “God damn it to hell,” Becker cried. “That’s not right.”

  “You don’t have to be foulmouthed about it,” Molly said, scowling.

  Becker flared up. “Listen, you —”

  “All right, all right,” said Herm. “Let’s knock off the bad feeling, everybody. We all miss our pal.”

  “Hell if she does,” Becker said. “She hated his guts.”

  “Now, don’t you talk like that,” said Molly. “Augie and I were friends since schooldays. There was a time when he was even sweet on me, I’ll tell you that—long before he hooked up with that one. Just after I switched to the public school. Dad couldn’t afford the tuition at Saint Catherine’s, but Father Phelan got mad at him when he pulled me out, and the result was Dad wouldn’t allow any of us kids to go to —”

  Becker interrupted her with a dirty laugh. “Any time Augie was interested in you…!”

  Molly jumped off the stool and pulled her purse to her. “I’m not staying here to be insulted.” Alongside her, old Gladys desperately downed in one gulp what was left in her glass—most of it, for ordinarily she would have nursed it for hours.

  “Sit down,” said Herm, “and have one on the house while you simmer down.” Gladys got a woebegone look, but he brightened her by adding, “You included, Glad.”

  “All I know is, Doc Spang determined he died of drowning,” Terwillen said.

  “I didn’t know there was any doubt about that,” said Al Hagman.

  Terwillen looked at him through the thick glasses. “He was bruised a lot, like beaten up, you know. They had a tough time pulling him out of the tub. Then they tried to give him artificial respiration. If you don’t really know how to do that, where to put your hands, you can do more harm than good. You can’t just lean on somebody’s ribs.”.

  “You don’t mean they could have hurt his chances?” asked Hagman, who had some beer foam on his horsy upper lip.

  “I’m not saying that.” Terwillen jerked his head left and right. “I’m saying he was quite a bit the worse for wear. But that was the explanation.”

  “It sure was a real lucky accident for them, wasn’t it?” said Molly. “Came at just the right time.”

  Joe Becker leaned around Hagman and belligerently asked Terwillen, “So what’s your opinion, Bobby? You were there just after it happened?”

  “Mel and Dick and Red got in the bathroom before me,” Terwillen explained. “There wasn’t any room left in there with all of them and the pulmotor too, so I stayed out and tried to calm the girl down.”

  “Poor kid,” said Hagman.

  “What do you think?” Becker demanded again of Terwillen, but before the latter could answer, added: “I got my own opinion.”

  “It’s not my place to say anything,” Terwillen answered. “I was there in an official capacity.”

  “I’ll come out and say it!” Becker shouted. “I wouldn’t put it past them to knock him off, and now they want to burn the evidence.”

  Herm came to him and, leaning across the bar, said, “Keep it down, will you, for pity’s sake? You could be sued for slander, unless you got some proof.”

  “Does it seem likely to you that a man who could survive all that combat would drown in his own bathtub? That’s what I keep asking myself. I know he had a few down here, but he didn’t have a load on by any means. That’s what she’s saying, isn’t it? That he was stinking drunk. That’s a dirty lie, and all of us know it.”

  “The fan fell on his head,” said Terwillen. “There was quite a gash in his scalp.”

  “You’re sticking up for them?”

  Terwillen glared at him through the magnifying lenses. “Now don’t you start on me. Your quarrel shouldn’t be with your friends.”

  Becker glared back for a second and then grimaced. “You’re right, Bobby. This thing’s hit me harder than I can say.”

  “It’s hit us all hard.” Terwillen shook Becker’s extended hand. “And maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the girl agrees with you.”

  “What’s that?” Hagman asked.

  “Still, a young girl will say anything. She was pretty worked up. She hadn’t seen her dad for four years, and she never saw him alive now. Think of that.”

  “She believes they murdered him?” asked Becker.

  Herm had stayed near them. He was uneasy. “What do you think, you guys? Should I leave it up?” He indicated the WELCOME HOME banner that was still draped across the mirror. “Maybe put some black crepe with it? Or just take it down, period, and reserve that corner there, with the postcards and so on, in memory of Augie?” He looked wistful. “Be nice to add some of his ribbons, but I guess the boy will want them. That’s his right.”

  Becker paid his tab and left the stool. “By God, I’m going to ask Howie Gross to look into the matter!” He went out with a desperate vigor.

  At the mention of the police chief’s name, Gladys came alive. “Howie’s my second cousin, you know. He was the worst kid in town in his day, always in one pickle or another. Who would know he’d end up as a cop?”

  Hagman said to Terwillen, “Still, Ellie’s talking about her mother, isn’t she? That’s an awful thing for a kid to be saying about her own mom.”

  “It’s an awful thing to think about her.”

  Molly called Herm over. “Joe Becker can’t say a word without resorting to profanity. I don’t care what his excuse is. We’re all upset, if it comes to that. But this is no place for ladies, if you don’t call him on his foul mouth.”

  Herm gave her a long look, then said, “I’ll speak to him.”

  “You just do that.”

  “The girl,” said Hagman, “she thinks her mother killed her father and she has to go on living with her?”

  Terwillen nodded. “I guess so. Where else can she go?”

  Hagman shook his head. “I don’t think it can be true. It wouldn’t make any sense, would it?”

  Terwillen saw Phil Paulsen coming in the door. “Here comes Phil. Do you think his brother will ever turn up?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Hagman muttered, “but no, I don’t. But I wouldn’t ever mention it to him.” He turned and greeted their friend with a hoisted glass.

  2

  “I never borrowed money from anybody in my life,” Orrie told Paul Leeds
. “I want you to know that.” What he did not mention was that he refused the sum wired him by his uncle Erie. “This is a special situation.”

  “I told you not to worry about it,” said Paul. “Just glad I can help out. I’m sure it’s a tough thing to lose your dad, when your father is someone you admire a lot. I don’t even like my own father, but I wouldn’t exactly want to see him dead.”

  Paul habitually complained about his father, a manufacturer—his son refused to say anything about him that was not disparaging, so Orrie was not sure just which product he manufactured—who was sufficiently rich to pay Paul a monthly allowance that would have taken care of Orrie’s requirements for a year.

  “I wasn’t all that close to my dad,” Orrie was careful to explain. He had always been literal, even as a small child, amusing his mother with, among many other things, a complex effort to characterize the weather with precision, when all she wanted was to hear simply whether it was nice or not (“It’s not exactly raining, but it’s not sunny either, and there’s a lot of black clouds…”). “I think I probably disappointed him, wasn’t much interested in the sports he liked, certainly wasn’t very good at them, never big enough to go out for football.”

  “You’re okay at tennis,” Paul said, a tall tan fellow who was much better. He was being flattering, as usual. Paul looked and moved as though he himself were a natural athlete and could probably have been a football star were he not so lazy. Orrie had to admit to himself that Paul seemed pretty much of a ne’er-do-well: he had turned up at this modest state institution after having flunked his first year at a hallowed university in the Ivy League. He now was starting out as a freshman again.

  Paul had taken an immediate liking to Orrie when they met in the line at registration time and (knowing how to do such things) arranged to replace the stranger originally assigned to share the latter’s dormitory room. Orrie had no objection. He could see that Paul had his flaws, but there would seem to be no reason to spurn the proffered friendship of a likable and generous guy.