Orrie's Story

by Thomas Berger

  Orrie had no intention of ever marrying, but he did very much want to participate in a love affair.

  But to have such a thought at this place and time, was it not a desecration? He switched the light off and went back along the dark hallway blindman-fashion, orienting himself by frequent touches of the wall until he came to the open doorway of his room. He remembered to grope around for Ellie, but sensed that she had left even before he went to the bathroom. Now, finally, he slept.

  9

  “It just isn’t right,” said Molly McShane to Gladys. “First she didn’t have a wake. Then she doesn’t put him in a grave.”

  Gladys spoke resentfully. “I didn’t go, and I’ll tell you why: I liked Augie all right and I feel sorry for those kids, but the way I look at it, Augie’s beyond knowing or caring whether I show up at a funeral of his, and I just didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. I never liked her since she was a kid.”

  Molly sipped at her sherry. “Anybody who was halfway normal would have had people over to the house after the services, but not her. Not that I would have gone.”

  From behind the bar Herm spoke to them all. “I thought maybe I’d have something here, but the only people me and Gwen are close to are yourselves, and you’d come here anyway. Anybody’s hungry, go back to the restaurant and Gwen will feed you.”

  They were all at the Idle Hour after attending Augie’s late-morning funeral. In addition to the regular gang, some of the wives had come along. Joe Becker’s Pauline was a teetotaler: a nurse, she was soon off to the hospital.

  Al Hagman was talking with Becker. Betty Hagman listened to Rickie Wicks, who, conspicuously avoiding anything to do with the funeral or the Menckens in general, was speaking of the high-school football team’s fall prospects. Betty anyway did not know the family well, for she had been reared elsewhere in the county, and her one child was far too young to have had any school-time associations with the Mencken children.

  “That’s right,” Becker told Hagman, “they didn’t find anything out of the ordinary at the autopsy.” He was calmer now than he had been of late. “It’s done now, and Aug’s a handful of ashes.” He looked into his glass. “Life is lousy.”

  “But better to go that way than like my mom,” Hagman said, tears growing in his eyes. “Five months of pain, screaming all night towards the end, when the morphine didn’t work any more.”

  A stool apart from the others, Bob Terwillen sat with his wife, a pleasingly plump woman with a face that was still girlishly pretty. She had been nursing one and the same glass of beer throughout their time there. Terwillen wore a sports jacket of green tweed, his dark suit having proved too tight to wear when he tried it on for the first time all year. Over the months he had put on more weight than he noticed.

  He still felt guilty about his reaction to seeing Augie Mencken’s body on the floor of the bathroom. He had in effect fled the scene. That no one but himself knew this—for the other fellows on the lifesaving squad had been occupied with their job—meant nothing. As a man of conscience he had only a superficial interest in the opinions of other people on moral matters pertaining to himself.

  “I was thinking,” he said to his wife. “Couldn’t we do something for the little Mencken girl? Maybe—”

  “Now, isn’t that a coincidence?” May exclaimed. “I was thinking the very same thing. If the summer wasn’t over, we could take her along to the lake.”

  The Terwillens were childless. For a week in the August just past, they had rented a cottage on Long Lake and greatly enjoyed the beach-antics of the children from neighboring cottages.

  “And what about the boy? I was almost thirty when my own dad died, but it broke my heart. I didn’t know I’d miss him so much. How we used to fight when I was in my teens! He rode me all the time, and I have to admit I hated his guts sometimes. I guess it was remembering those days and wishing I could have told him he was right and I was wrong, which I never did, though I got to be friends with him later on. You know how those things go.”

  “We always think of it too late,” said May. “I tell you what I’d love to do with little Ellie: buy her a decent dress and maybe get her hair fixed. She could look very sweet. That was awful, that black outfit she was wearing at the funeral: cut down from some old castoff of her mother’s, I bet, and she looked real anemic. I wonder if the poor little thing gets enough to eat over there?” She looked away and then back, lowering her voice. “I know you thought the world of Augie, but otherwise it’s a pretty awful family.”

  “You can’t blame that on the kids,” said her husband. “And you could put it another way: they’re all okay except Esther and E.G.”

  “And the girl that ran away.”

  “Maybe she knew what she was doing,” said Terwillen. He peered at the rim of his glass, from which he had drunk nothing for some time. “I spoke to them both, got ‘em aside after the services.”

  “I wondered where you went.”

  “I wanted to be confidential, you know. Got them back in the little hall off the rear parlor.” He looked away as if embarrassed.

  “And?”

  “I guess I should have checked with you first, but I got the idea all of a sudden, and I acted on it. What I told them was—now you might disagree, but knowing you I don’t think you really will. What I said to them was, if you kids ever need a place to stay, you just come right over any time, no matter when, to our house.”

  “That was nice, Bobby.”

  “You mean it?” He now peered at his wife.

  “Why sure. You ought to know that. I just wish I thought of it first.” She made a little fist and gently tapped his biceps with it.

  Terwillen readjusted his glasses at the temples. “Actually, I went a bit further. I was inviting them to move in and stay permanently, if they wanted.”

  May continued to smile but was puzzled. “Why would they be needing a permanent home someplace else? Wouldn’t Esther have something to say about that? I know she leaves something to be desired in many ways, but she’s still their mother.”

  Terwillen briefly lifted the heavy eyeglasses and rubbed the indentations they had impressed into his upper nose. “I don’t know. I just got a bad feeling in that house. I’d like to see the kids out of it before something else happens that we’ll all be sorry for.”

  “Anything you want is okay by me, Bobby. You know that, I hope. But maybe you just can’t get out of the mood of what happened the other night.” It was sometimes the case that a woman as maternal as May never became a mother, but found that her natural attributes did not go to waste if she had a man to comfort.

  “Well, anyway, I made the offer,” Terwillen said. “I don’t know what the girl felt. She’s changed since the night of the accident—which she then claimed wasn’t an accident. I guess she was just in shock then. She’s hardened up since. She acted like she didn’t even remember me, just kept her eyes on her brother. But the boy, Augie Junior —”

  “Orrie.”

  “Orrie—he gave me this funny look, and he said, ‘Well all right, if you really mean it. We’ll keep it in mind.’”

  “He wasn’t any politer than that?”

  “Oh, he called me Mister and so on, and thanked me.”

  May moued and said, “I hope so. You know Augie, rest his soul, always had the nicest manners when you came into his store. I never forget that. E.G. doesn’t have any manners at all. He pushed right past me today without a word, and I can’t believe it’s because he’s so broken up by Augie’s death.”

  Terwillen nodded. “He’s never been known for being much of a gentleman, but he looks sick now, besides. You notice that? The black circles under his eyes, and he’s got a bad colon Maybe yellow jaundice?”

  “They all look awful except Esther,” May Terwillen said, smirking. “I’ve never seen her looking better. I got to admit it, though she’s older than me. Black seems to suit her. And how about that veil? No women around here wear veils. That’s the kind of thing you see in
the movies.”

  Herm was there again. “Everything okay, folks? You ought to drop in more often, May, not just when somebody dies. This is a respectable place for ladies.”

  “Well, I’m no drinker, Herm.”

  “You notice how awful E. G. Mencken looks?” Terwillen asked.

  Herm rolled his eyes. “Never liked his looks in the first place.”

  “Listen,” Terwillen said, “I saw the nice card on your floral piece.” He reached for the wallet in his back pants pocket. “I want to kick in something: it’s only right.”

  “No,” said Herm, backing away with raised hands. “Don’t make an enemy of me, Bobby. That was little enough.” He left.

  “What’s that, Bobby? I didn’t read it. Forgot my glasses.”

  “Herm bought that beautiful piece out of his own pocket, but the card read, ‘So long, Augie, from all your pals at the Idle Hour.’ I wish he’d let me kick in.”

  “Well,” May said, “we did send our own flowers.” She brought her purse from her lap and shifted her weight on the stool. “Time to go home and get a meal together.” She had no inclination towards lunching on the premises, having seldom eaten a restaurant meal that came up to the quality of what you could do in your own kitchen.

  Herm asked Rickie Wicks about Phil Paulsen. “I didn’t see him at the funeral.”

  “Maybe he didn’t go. Augie’s death got him thinking more about his brother. There wasn’t much in common between the two, but I guess he’s superstitious, sees what happened to Augie as maybe a bad sign, I don’t know.”

  “The preacher was doing her a favor,” Molly said to Gladys. “None of the Menckens were ever seen in any church, according to everything I heard. This man had never seen Augie when he was alive—he came to town only two years ago—so he didn’t have any idea of what to say about him, except that he was, quote, ‘a pillar of the community.’” She leaned to say sotto voce, “That’s a laugh—with all respect to the dead.”

  “He was a war hero,” Gladys noted reprovingly. “They can’t take that away from him.”

  Molly nodded grudgingly. She didn’t know about that subject, never having herself been under arms, and it was her way never to speak of things of which she was ignorant. Instead she referred to the unprecedented haste with which Esther had had Augie cremated. “She didn’t want to waste time on a wake. What’s the hurry? E.G.’s not going to marry somebody her age.”

  10

  The funeral director told E.G. that Orrie and Ellie had left with the rest of the people and when last seen were turning the corner into High Street: an event he had noticed because he thought it unusual that they had not remained to join in the accompanying of their father’s body to the crematorium.

  E.G. and Esther drove through the business district but looked for the children in vain. Finally the time came when E.G. pointed out that the hearse would already have arrived at its destination and they’d better follow suit or the body would be burned with no family present. As if things weren’t bad enough as it was.

  They sat together in whatever the place was called, waiting room, parlor, or whatnot, just two people amidst all the empty folding chairs. Vases of flowers were on stands in the corners, and recorded funeral music was piped in through speakers embedded in the walls. Both windows were covered with tightly closed Venetian blinds, so nothing of the day—a cool one with the winds that were especially strong up here in the hills, but bright—could enter to alleviate the oppressive atmosphere within.

  Everything E.G. ate or drank became corrosive when it reached his stomach. This was true even of straight milk and American cheese. It was probably an ulcer, but he dreaded so much going to the doctor that up to this point he had tried to make do with baking soda, Bromo and Alka seltzers and the like. The condition predated the murder but was hardly helped by the effort that had been needed to kill his cousin, as opposed to the quick, neat, clean, and even almost painless means that had been planned by him. He could not abide anything slimy. He had puked after killing Augie, not in repugnance with the deed, but rather because phlegm had come from the facial orifices of the dying man.

  He had no current interest in sex. He was sick and he was lonely. He realized that he probably should not have baited Esther into throwing the vase at him, but for her part she should not have jeered at him on the subject of Orrie. As to slugging her, he had no regrets about that. She could have wounded him badly, even killed him, in which latter case she would have dispatched both her men within the same week. The irony of this reflection did not amuse him.

  “Christ,” he mumbled now, leaning towards her and speaking in an undertone though aside from themselves nobody was in the room, “this is taking forever.”

  Esther stared grimly ahead and said nothing.

  “I’m sick of that music,” he went on. “If you’re still around when my number’s up, make it something else, will you? John Philip Sousa or something.”

  Esther continued to look at the back of the folding chair in front of her.

  “I guess,” he said, “you’re still sore about the other day. Well, those things happen. You hand it out, you can expect to take it.”

  At last she turned her face to him. “You’re avoiding the subject.”

  “Huh?”

  “What bothers me is I can’t pay for this. How’s that going to look?”

  “You want money, right?” he asked, smirking and looking away and then back. “So why don’t you just come out and ask for it?”

  She was disgusted. “How about you asking once in a while if I need some? Figuring it out without me giving you a bill?”

  “I should do that and pay for it too?” He showed a mirthless smile. “You got a warped way of seeing things. No, if I’m supposed to do the paying, then you do the rest.”

  She bit her lip. He had her there, and she knew it. She said bitterly, “I called the Veterans Administration again. They still can’t find any records on Augie.”

  “That’s crazy,” said E.G. “You better go down there in person.”

  “What good would that do? I don’t have any further information on what he did in the service. We’ve got to find that girl of his. She should know something about his Army career, if she was going to marry him. I guess he met her when he got back from overseas. She must live near the last camp he was at.”

  The same sober man who had welcomed them to the crematorium now entered the room. E.G. assumed that the cardboard box in the man’s white fingers held what Augie had been reduced to: ash, presumably. He had no intention of examining the substance.

  Putting on her air of bereavement, Esther accepted the container, and they left the place.

  In the car E.G. said, nodding at what she held, “What are you going to do with that?”

  “I was going to get rid of them, but I got a better idea. I’m going to give them to Ellie. Something’s eating her. Maybe this will get her mind off whatever it is. She was close to Augie, though God knows he paid as little attention to her as to any of the rest of us. He was all for himself.”

  “Funny,” said E.G. as he pulled the car out of the asphalt parking lot of the crematorium, “I thought she was acting a little nicer lately.”

  “She is. That’s what’s wrong. It’s not natural. I told you Orrie got in late, really late, last night. We had an argument. Then I went back to bed, but before I got to sleep I heard her going down the hall and into his room.”

  He was on a steep section of the road, with a sharp turn coming up, but E.G. expressed his concern at what he heard. “They’re getting too old for that kind of thing, aren’t they? You ought to say something. Maybe nothing’s going on, but still it doesn’t look good.”

  She stared at him. “What are you talking about? For God’s sake, don’t be creepy. What worries me is what she might have told him about the other night.”

  E.G. negotiated the big car around the hairpin, then replied. “What could she tell him? She wasn’t in the house at the time.”


  “She came back!”

  “You know what I mean. He was dead by then. She went out for beer. By time she got back, we were trying to revive him.” He did not bother to characterize the last phrase as ironic: that was self-evident.

  Esther put the box of ashes on the floor, bracketing it with her feet. “I don’t know exactly what she knows about us.”

  “Come on,” said E.G.

  “I mean it. She’s not like I was at her age. She’s a stupid kid—not at schoolwork but with everything about real life.”

  “What I wish I knew is what Orrie knows or thinks,” said E.G. “But he’s acting the same as always.” He was struck by such a surge of self-pity that he all but gasped. “I wonder if that will change when we finally tell him.” He glanced at Esther. He suspected her of wanting to keep the secret forever, even though she had had no respect for Augie. Of course, her motives were selfish: revealing that Orrie was a bastard would reflect on her reputation. Indignantly, even though he could anticipate her answer, which on the rational level made sense, he asked, “When are we going to tell him?”