Orrie's Story

by Thomas Berger

  They had been close when he was very young, but as adolescence proceeded, Orrie thrust his mother ever farther from him. That this might well be normal—as E.G. insisted, though here the source should be considered, for the boy had consistently, at whatever age, rejected him—made it no easier to accept. With Gena gone, Esther saw herself as fundamentally alone, despite the association with E.G. that finally extended to a partnership in murder. He was not flesh of her flesh. To be without strong blood-connections at her age, a woman was utterly defenseless.

  The room still smelled faintly of Orrie, who as a child always exuded a natural bouquet and did not lose it even as an adolescent. Never had she detected the smell of sweat on him, as with Augie, or E.G.’s often strong breath. Her son was the most attractive male she had ever known.

  After a while she lay back on the bed. It was serene here, in the growing twilight, between the silhouette of the desk he had acquired, with his own saved-up money, at a used-furniture store and the bookcase he had made from scratch in manual-training class, the titles of the volumes on the shelves thereof too dim to distinguish now, but she could remember many, having started him on the childhood classics at an early age, Tanglewood Tales and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, with romantic illustrations of long-haired ladies and men in gleaming chain mail. They shared a love for stories about heroic animals like Balto the Noble Sled Dog who got the serum to Nome and Buck in Call of the Wild. There was a summer when Albert Payson Terhune, teller of true-dog tales, was the exclusive source of all Orrie’s reading. Yet she had never got him a pet of his own.

  Orrie was the sort of child to whom such things could be explained. When Esther was a kid her mother had no extra money to spend on a pet, but the girl adored the fox terrier that belonged to the next-door neighbors, which love was requited by Sparky, who spent most of his free time, in those leashless, fenceless days of yore, in her yard. To other people in the neighborhood, however, the animal was a pestilence, lifting his leg on prized zinnias, shitting on footpaths, barking at sunrise, and finally someone fed him poisoned food. He came to Esther to die in horrible convulsions. Never again could she expose herself to the risk of such agony. As to cats, she was as indifferent to them as they to her, and when nine-year-old Ellie came home once with a stray kitten found on a riverbank at the school picnic, it was Augie who had supported his daughter’s cause, saying surely the creature had escaped from the bag in which, with the rest of an unwanted litter, it was supposed to be drowned. Such a will to life must be celebrated! All right, but it was up to Ellie to care for it. Which presumably the girl was still doing, for these many years later, the black-and-white feline could be seen now and again slinking about the yard. Esther had at least banned it from the house.

  Like her, Orrie was cold to cats. He shared most of her tastes until, beginning to feel his oats as a growing man, he had believed it necessary to oppose his mother. Nevertheless, underneath it all, he cherished her. He had to. He came from her, and now she had no one else.

  Though assuming she had stayed awake throughout her reveries, Esther must have drifted off at some point, for when next she became aware of the room the window had disappeared, taking with it all else that had been visible by its failing light.

  She had just risen from the bed and started for the doorway when the gooseneck lamp on the desk suddenly came on. Its illumination of the room was indirect, its focus on the banker’s green blotter beneath it and thus not blinding. Still, she had been in the dead dark, to which the introduction of any light would be oppressive. In this case it was also frightening: a male figure could be discerned but not instantaneously identified. Oddly enough, as she reflected later, she had assumed it was Augie, and believed she was not yet out of a nightmare. Then the moment passed.

  “Orrie! God, I was worried.” She stretched her arms towards him, but he stayed where he was. It had been some years since he let her embrace him.

  “What are you doing in here?” He was scowling.

  “I was worried. You were due hours ago.”

  He shrugged and at last lowered the suitcase.

  “I’ve got a lot on my shoulders now, you know,” she went on defensively. “I’m all alone.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said coldly. “You’ve got Ellie… and of course there’s always Erie.”

  She had never been sure just what he believed about her association with E.G. In some ways Orrie was an innocent and yet in others he seemed to have a sophistication beyond his years. The trouble was in identifying just where one state left off and the other began. They had always been circumspect when Orrie was in residence. E.G. never stayed the night unless the boy was away at Scout camp or, during the school years, sleeping over at a friend’s house. They had been less careful with Ellie, who was younger, insensitive to what went on around her, and had so little sense of herself that she was easy to ignore…. Perhaps it was time to be motherly.

  “Have you eaten anything? I bought hamburger—?”

  He waved the offer away. She thought it strange that he had thus far made no reference to Augie’s death. She had told him the details on the phone, but such matters are normally reprised again and again, even with nonintimates. The neighbors on the north, a middle-aged couple named Neblett, had already visited twice, on the pretext of bringing food (molasses cookies, tuna casserole), but came really to hear repetitions of the story of the tragic event. And though Esther had no friends locally, some pretending to be such, e.g., Molly McShane, called with bogus sympathy but a ghoulish curiosity that was genuine.

  “It was terrible the other night.”

  Orrie swung the valise onto the desktop and, careful to avoid the lamp, opened it and poked within.

  “Everybody did everything they could,” Esther continued. “But everything was useless.”

  Orrie found what he was looking for, a pair of pajamas, crumpled and none too clean-looking. He closed the suitcase and put it on the floor.

  He said rudely, “I’m going to bed now.”

  She stared at him for á moment and then asked, “Why are you acting like this?”

  He tossed the pajamas onto the bed and defiantly returned her stare. “Like what?”

  “What are you mad at me for?” She managed to feel like an authentic victim. “All I’ve been through the last couple of days, and you’re being like this? Are you blaming me? He was drunk, Orrie. I hadn’t seen him in four years, yet he stops first at the Idle Hour and drinks with his pals before he comes home. He was dirty and needed a shave. And you should know this: he told me he had a girl he met near the Army camp down South. But not only that: he wanted a divorce so he could marry this floozy.”

  Orrie remained impassive.

  “You know what kind of girl hangs around Army bases. Imagine him coming back after all those years of not providing for his family, and talking about some little streetwalker with a social disease. He had no respect for me whatsoever, nor for his family.”

  “Well,” Orrie said without apparent emotion, “he’s beyond that now.”

  “He did it all himself!” Esther cried, realizing she was speaking too desperately but unable to restrain herself. “It wasn’t even that hot a day to call for the fan. I guess he was overheated by the drinking.”

  “Where was Erie?”

  “Here. Heard Augie got to town and wanted to see him—you know how close they always were. Ellie was here too.”

  “She went out to the store?”

  Esther peered sharply at him. “Where did you hear that?”

  “I saw her after school today.”

  Esther needed a delay in which to collect her thoughts. She turned the desk chair around and sat down on it. “Well now,” she said, “this is the first I heard of that.” The little bitch had not breathed a word. “Then you’ve been in town for hours.”

  “You were with Erie the whole time?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Orrie raised his voice. “Just answe
r!”

  She pointed at him. “Don’t speak to your mother in that tone of voice.”

  “Was he alone with Dad at any time?”

  She stood up, pretending to greater resentment than she felt. “You’re being silly. Is your sister trying to cause some trouble? Let me tell you about E.G. If we had only known, we could have saved your father’s life. There he was, unconscious, head under water, filling his lungs, and we were sitting right downstairs.”

  “What did you care if he wanted a divorce?” Orrie asked. “He had not been around here for years, and you never had a good word to say about him when he was.”

  “Now, look here, don’t you —” But she was not convincing, even to herself. “You’re exhausted,” she said. “God knows what you were doing, drifting around town all day. It must be way after midnight now. You get some sleep. You won’t have these crazy theories when you wake up in the morning. We’ll have a nice breakfast. Just what you like: French toast. I’ll send her over to get some little sausages.”

  “Yeah,” he said in the flattest of voices. “Ellie’s used to running over to Harriman’s.”

  Esther stuck to the high tone. “Goodnight, Orrie. Sweet dreams. I feel a lot better with you in the house. You have to be the man around here now.” She suspected that any, attempt on her part to come closer to him physically would have negative results and therefore turned and swept out the door. He was after all a kid of eighteen, whose experience of the world now amounted to a few weeks at college with other children of his age. She was well aware he had not yet known a woman sexually, though of course she had never exchanged a word with him on that subject. He was still a child, her child, and she knew he loved his mother. He had no alternative.

  8

  Orrie had only just discovered for himself that when conditions demand it, sobering up, at least sufficiently to meet the new situation, could be done in less time than it took to get drunk—insofar as moral and emotional matters were concerned. The physical effects were more persistent: he had a dry throat, an aching head, a sour stomach, and his eyes burned. To be sure, he had had no sleep thus far this night, which by now must have gone past three. Yet he stayed awake to wonder how drunk one must be to drown in a bathtub—even with a head wound.

  “Are you sleeping?” It was Ellie, who had opened his door so quietly he had not heard her. His eyes were now adjusted to the darkness, which was not complete owing to the moonlight that entered through his uncurtained window.

  As it happened, he had had enough of her today. “What do you want? You know what time it is?”

  She sat down on the bed. “Keep your voice down, I don’t want her to hear.”

  “She was just in here.”

  “I know,” said Ellie. “I keep tabs on her.”

  “You stay up all night? Listen, you’re just a kid. You need your sleep.”

  “I thought maybe she had him in here.”

  Orrie did not want to think about that subject. “She was worried about me. I just got in.”

  “I know. I was waiting for you.”

  “All right, but get back to bed now, will you? We can talk tomorrow.”

  “Can I stay? I get scared by myself.”

  “I thought you had my knife. Anyway, nobody’s in the house now but us.”

  She merely repeated, in a plaintive whisper, “I’m scared.” After a pause, she added, “Remember when we were real little? I was, anyhow, but you and Gena weren’t very old, either. And sometimes we’d stay with Grandma and all three sleep in the same big old double bed? I sometimes think of the old days like that.”

  “What are you getting at?” he asked with a scowl. “We’re way too old to sleep in the same bed, for God’s sake. It might even be against the law.” He softened his tone. “Go back to your room. I’m right down the hall. I won’t let anything bad happen to you, I promise.”

  “Remember what else you promised,” she whispered solemnly.

  Not wishing to detain her, he did not ask for her interpretation of his so-called promise, which actually, if he remembered it correctly, was no more than agreeing to look into the matter of their father’s death. Had he not done as much, just now, with Mother?

  “Look,” he said. “Apparently Dad had been drinking. You get mixed up when you drink. I found that out only recently!”

  “Come on, Orrie. You’re not joining their side!”

  He clasped her forearm. “This is not a thing of sides, for God’s sake. Can’t you get that through your head? It’s not some football game. It’s life and death.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  He let her go. “All I’m doing is trying to find out the details of what actually happened. You may not understand this, or want to understand it, but to be taken seriously you have to deal with details. Let me tell you that so far the details I’ve heard from her could only be attacked by means of other details that contradicted hers.” She started to object, but he said, “Now, you listen to what I’m saying.”

  She quietly burst into tears and threw her arms around his neck. When she could speak, she did so in the little depression defined by his collarbone. “If they get away with this…”

  She was wearing pajamas of some smooth-finished fabric very like that of his own. Gena had been given to short, fancy nighties with matching underpants of which you could see too much whenever she moved. He could remember his mother’s remonstrating with her for parading around the house like that, but Dad had pointed out that she was still just a child—which to Orrie seemed a loose use of the term. Yet it was unbearable to think of Erie’s violating her. Maybe a stranger, if drunk, might, assuming from her mature figure and her manner—Orrie had been embarrassed to be seen with her en route to school, the way she had begun to walk—some grown male, full of drink, might take her for an older girl, one beyond the age of consent. But Erie knew how old she was. Beyond that, he was a relative.

  “Listen,” he said to Ellie, “would you be willing to testify about what he did to Gena? That’s not only the thing with a minor but it might be incest or something too. He’ll go to the penitentiary.”

  “Do you think I could mention that to anybody in the whole world but you? Anyhow, they wouldn’t believe me. I’m just a silly young girl, and he’s this big important man, with his big car and pocketsful of money and all.”

  “He’s not that big,” said Orrie. “But I guess to really make it stick, we’ll have to find Gena…. She won’t even know Dad is dead, will she?”

  Ellie pulled her head back and said dolefully, “If she’s still alive.”

  What a thought. “Why do you say that?”

  “We’ve never heard one word in all these years. That’s not like her. Maybe she didn’t become a big movie star or anything else much, but she could always lie about how well she was doing. I know Gena: the truth never stopped her before. She lied all the time to Mother and Dad and the teachers. Why not now?”

  Everything was so awful. “Go on to bed,” he told Ellie, separating himself from her as gently as he could. “I’m really tired out. I can’t think straight without some sleep.” He rolled over, face into the pillow. Sometimes when he was small, sleeping in that position, he would awaken with the illusion that he was being suffocated but, hands paralyzed, could do nothing to save himself, yet knew all the while that it was a matter of the personal will: all he had to do to breathe was simply to revolve from prone to supine. But the struggle to achieve this end called for a heroic effort of which he was forever incapable. He was dying the most miserable and stupid death…then suddenly he would liberate himself! Turned face-up, gulping sweet air, he would be immediately embarrassed to reflect that as a crisis it had been phony and meaningless, a fantasy: nobody could accidentally perish as the result of having gone to sleep with his face involuntarily embedded in a pillow.

  Drowning was an elaborate form of suffocation. Though his mind was clouded by alcohol and then a blow to the head, did Dad know in his soul that he was dying? Orrie
hoped not. He found himself praying to that effect, to Something, if not the deity that he had no longer believed in as of the age when adult hair began to appear on his body and his sweat developed a strong odor. As he was asking now that his father rest in peace, it was not the moment to cry, God damn you, God, for allowing this to happen to him, to us, all of us!

  He had no sense whether he actually slept or was rather in some other state of psychic suspension, but he found no rest wherever. At one point during the night he was stirred by the knowledge that unless he exerted the utmost self-discipline he would wet the bed, and he forced himself to rise but remained in the same coma into which he had fallen on saying goodnight to Ellie, else he might have reacted more strongly to being at the scene of his father’s death. He could not of course ever bathe there again. He could not even bear to look directly at the tub.

  He peed, having carefully raised both lid and seat, for failures to do which as a sleepy child he had been punished, though not once, despite close calls, had he ever pissed any bed. Punished—yes, his French toast ration, next morning, had been cut by half a slice, or something equally mild. He had always been his mother’s favorite: he would have known that even if it had not been mentioned so often by Gena when she was in trouble. Ellie was not the kind to bring up such matters, for he was her big brother. Each family connection was different from the others: he had not thought of that before. Would he even have known any of these people had he not shared their blood? Would he even, like Oedipus, not have recognized his mother under certain conditions?

  The drama society at college was preparing a production of the ancient Greek play, and on a whim informed by an urge to distinguish himself somehow so as to attract girls, Orrie had gone to the open auditions held for all but the major roles and read, in what he could helplessly hear was a quavering voice much higher-pitched than usual, for the part of First Messenger, “a shepherd from Corinth”: “May I learn from you, strangers, where is the house of the king, Oedipus? Or better still, tell me where he himself is—if ye know.” It went without saying that he was not chosen for the cast, but he anyway privately read the entire play, whose shocking theme had surely kept it from even being mentioned in high school. Right now he would be too embarrassed to tell the plot to Ellie, who in high school was reading the innocent and corny poetry of Felicia D. Hemans, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier. She knew nothing of the great world beyond her small one…yet it was she who insisted that murder had been done in the very place where he was standing—for he did, after all, find the courage to go to the bathtub and stare into it, prepared to be numbed by horror but instead seeing it as only what it was, a banal receptacle for water, into which he had periodically immersed himself, though never without missing the shower they had enjoyed at their previous home, which had been lost through his father’s financial failures, well known in the family even before his dad had gone to war. His parents had quarreled too much on that matter. It was only money.