Orrie's Story

by Thomas Berger

  She sneered. “I’ll tell him I’m giving the ashes to Ellie because Augie wasn’t his father. That should make him feel good.”

  “You really ought to watch that mouth of yours. I’m the only friend you’ve got.” His tolerance for cunty behavior was reaching its quota. She was someone without a source of income except a G.I. insurance policy she could not collect on.

  11

  “No,” Ellie repeated, her mouth set in that stubborn way he knew so well. “I’m not leaving.”

  Orrie started again to explain why it would be the right thing for her to accept the Terwillens’ offer. “They’re nice people. You can see that.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it,” said Ellie. “This is my home. I’ve got as much right as anybody to live here. And I’m staying.”

  “I’ve got to get back to school soon. I’ll worry about you living here.”

  They were in Ellie’s room, Gena’s former side of which was preserved pretty much as she left it, with fan-mag photos of movie stars thumbtacked on the wall. The chenille bedspread, which could have used a wash, was covered with things Ellie had dropped there.

  His sister looked at him in disdain. “You’re just going back without doing anything?”

  He threw up his hands. “I don’t know what I could do.”

  “Listen,” Ellie cried, “I wouldn’t go with those goddamn murderers to where my dad was burned to ashes. I hope he understands that, wherever he is now. It wasn’t out of lack of respect for him.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Orrie said gently.

  “I’m not going to forgive and forget. You go on back to college, if you want, but I’m staying right here, you can rely on that. They’ll make a mistake one of these days, and I’ll be here to see it.”

  Orrie smiled. “You mean Erie is all of a sudden going to confess? Come on.” Of course he had always rejected Ellie’s accusations against his mother, but the fact was that neither did he seriously believe Erie was a murderer. He had just been humoring her. But he had discovered that it is difficult when you are around somebody with an obsession totally to avoid being touched by it. Still, he had not really gone further than allowing for the possibility that Erie had maybe bungled his attempts at artificial respiration.

  He sat on the chair that went with her little knotty-pine desk. Ellie remained standing. Now she walked to the open doorway and listened for a moment. But it was obvious that Mother and Erie had not returned. She was really getting warped. There was a word for that state of mind, but at the moment it escaped him. When it came back to the memory, he should write it down. At school he had begun to keep a list of new terms, so as to improve his vocabulary now that he was a college student. Paul had seen it once and asked, “What’s this?” When told, he shook his head and smiled admiringly. “You’re going to get somewhere one of these days.”

  “I know you’re older,” Ellie was saying. “And more experienced and, since you’re a boy, probably smarter, but —”

  Orrie had to interrupt her there. “Your grades are as high as mine were in history and English, and you do better at the toughest stuff of all: math. Miss Sheely gave me a break in algebra, else I’d never have passed. I bet you’re getting your usual A’s in trig.”

  “But,” she continued as if he had not said a word, “I wonder if you really know much about people.”

  “I suppose you do?”

  “I know Mother and Erie are sleeping together.”

  Orrie had never admitted it to himself in so many words. He was staggered now to hear it from his kid sister. He rose from the chair and walked to the door of the closet and back. Of course he had known it—in the way you know you will be burned if you put your finger in a candle flame, so you don’t go and verify your knowledge, you just let it be, you simply avoid bringing unprotected flesh near fire: you have no reason ever to talk about it.

  “Why do you mention something like that?” he asked. “I don’t like the way you have begun to talk.”

  “You’re criticizing we?”

  “One thing you don’t seem to know is what to talk about and what not. You’re the one who doesn’t know about people.” His anger increased as he spoke. “It’s beneath you. Haven’t you got anything better to do with your life? Why don’t you wash your hair, for example? Or change the tape on those glasses? It’s dirty, for God’s sake. I don’t know where you suddenly got the right to lord it over everybody else in creation. You’re just a young kid in a little town nobody’s ever heard of. All of a sudden you act like you’re some kind of princess.”

  The appalling thing was that nothing he said seemed to have any effect on his sister. She should have run from the room or, staying, have been in tears, but her expression was almost serene. “Go on,” she said, “get it out of your system.”

  He said, “Oh, hell,” and put his hot forehead against the cool frame of the door to the hallway.

  “Look,” Ellie said sympathetically. “It’s not your fault. I can tell you this: they’ve been doing it since long before Daddy went to the war. It was Gena who told me.”

  Orrie turned. “Will you stop? What’s gained by this?”

  “That’s why they murdered him. Well, that and his Army insurance. She keeps calling the government and trying to collect.”

  Orrie covered his ears. “Stop it, just stop it!” Then he said, as calmly as he could, “If that were true, it would be the best argument against their murdering him. Why would they have to, if they got away with it anyway? And Erie doesn’t need money.” But to speak like that was mutilating to his soul. His mother could not be touched by filth: he besmirched himself even by submitting the matter to discussion.

  Ellie shrugged inside the black sweater she had borrowed from Gena’s abandoned wardrobe. With the old pleated black skirt and the black beret she had insisted on wearing, so as to cover her head as befitted an adult woman at a Christian ceremony, it had been her funeral ensemble. Almost obscenely snug at Gena’s bosom, the garment hung sacklike from her sister’s thin shoulders.

  “Why,” she said, “they got used to having Daddy away. They didn’t want to go back to sneaking around, that’s obvious.”

  Again he was offended by her juvenile smugness. Their father was murdered, Gena dead in exile, their mother a harlot and a murderess. Ellie produced such theories effortlessly. She, who had never so much as walked home from school alongside a boy, knew all about illicit, even perverted sex…. He had finally made up his mind: Ellie had some kind of mental problem. She was not exactly crazy, just not quite normal. It was probably only a temporary condition, nothing that required confinement in an asylum or electric-shock treatments, such as had been done to the goofy brother of one of Orrie’s high-school friends, Jimmy Wendt, without doing any good whatever for the guy, who was kept at home thereafter, mowing the lawn and raking leaves: the mothers warned neighborhood children to keep their distance, lest they be seized and misused by the maniac, who Jimmy however insisted was absolutely harmless.

  Orrie knew there was a type of doctor who just talked to patients with nonphysical problems and gave them things to quiet their nerves. He was no authority on the subject. It seemed to him that his father had had a nervous breakdown, so called, after the business failure. He could not recall what the treatment, if any, had been. Perhaps just the passing of time. Maybe that would work for Ellie. But if she meanwhile continued to slander all and sundry!

  “I want you to go to the doctor,” he now told his sister.

  Her eyes quickened behind the lenses. “Say, that’s a good idea,” she cried. “And find out if an electric fan, falling like that, could knock a man unconscious enough for him to drown without waking up.”

  Orrie suppressed an urge to exclaim in despair, and replied as gently as he could, “That was already done at the autopsy. …What I’m talking about is that you get a checkup. Tell him you probably need something for your nerves.” He grinned. “You’re not nuts or anything—except in the normal way of g
irls your age—but this thing has been an awful lot for you to bear. He’ll understand, I’ll bet.”

  She was staring at him.

  “He might even want to send you on to someone else, a specialist in nervous problems, who —”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Ellie asked.

  “Don’t worry about the fees,” Orrie said. “I’ll work something out.”

  “Are you talking about a psychiatrist?”

  “Certainly not. Not someone who deals with lunatics, for God’s sake. But there’s another sort of doctor, who just deals with the kind of upsets of the nerves normal people have when things get out of control.”

  Ellie grimaced in disbelief. “You mean, where you lie down on a couch and talk about your dreams?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard about it? Well, I don’t think it’s only that.” Ellie had always been intellectually precocious. She sometimes even read Scientific American.

  “Do you realize?” she asked. “You’re acting as if I’m the one with the problem.”

  “I certainly didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “Don’t worry: you haven’t.” But she said it so frostily he knew he had. He was relieved of the need to figure out where to go from there by the sound of his mother’s return, downstairs.

  He went quickly to his room and closed the door, but before long there was a knock, and his mother’s voice asked, “Are you there?”

  He opened the door. She was the most attractive woman he had yet seen in real life, slightly taller than he, and so far as he knew he had reached his maximum growth. He could not remember her ever before wearing a completely black outfit, though perhaps she had done so at the funerals of other relatives, which had all taken place when he was very young.

  She was angry. “Will you please tell me why you two ran away? You embarrassed me, you know. That doesn’t surprise me in her case. But you.”

  “I know it might have looked strange —”

  “Is that the word for it?”

  He beckoned her inside and gently closed the door. “Ellie’s in a bad way,” he said. “She absolutely refused to go, and I didn’t want to leave her wander around by herself.”

  “We all lost someone, didn’t we?” his mother asked, looking at him with angry dark eyes. “Why is it worse for her than for anyone else?”

  Because she cared for him more than any of the rest of us did… But that would have been out of line to say on the day of cremation.

  Instead: “She’s got a delicate system. I think she should go to the doctor and get something for her nerves.”

  “That’s crap,” his mother said vulgarly, and loudly enough to be heard through a closed door. “She’s putting it on to get attention, as usual!” She strode to the door and flung it open. “We’ve got to have a little conference and straighten things out. I’ll meet you both downstairs.”

  When he reached the hall, Ellie was standing there. She had heard. They went down the stairway in silence, she a step behind.

  Their mother stood at the table where the green glass vase had been for years. He noticed its absence. In its place was a cardboard box. She told them to sit down.

  Orrie joined Ellie on the couch, which had a summer cover on it throughout the year because it needed reupholstering. But the room was seldom used. They never had guests unless Uncle Erie could be called such.

  “We need to get some things straight,” his mother said now, looking at the worn rug. “Life goes on and we’ve got to live it. You should know I am having trouble in locating your father’s Army insurance, I don’t know why. I haven’t even been able to find his serial number. As it is, he’s left us with nothing so far.”

  “I’m leaving school,” Orrie said, “and getting a job.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m not contributing anything. I can get hired tomorrow at the factory.” He referred to the automobile assembly plant just across the state line, which had been occupied with military vehicles during the war but was expected soon to return to family cars. Several of his male contemporaries had gone there last summer, directly on graduation from high school, while they waited to be drafted.

  “Don’t talk like that. As it is, you’re paying your own way completely, with the scholarship and waiting on tables. Hang on and you’ll be a doctor and be able to name your own price. You’ll be somebody, not some loser who lets everyone down.”

  He was really uneasy at being used for the purposes of adverse implication on his dead father and hastily said, “The work as waiter just takes care of the board. I’m going to look for something else that pays real wages. I got my nights and weekends.”

  His mother winced and at last sat down. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not. You must stick to your studies. I’ll get by. I just say it might be tough.”

  Ellie spoke in her high-pitched voice. “I’ll try baby-sitting again.” She had had little success at that pursuit. Though there were local girls who made good money at such work, Ellie had not been able to get hired by anybody but a young wife who had had a baby almost nine months after her husband had been drafted. Still a teenager herself, the girl found it hard to accept her new responsibility and wanted a baby-sitter to take care of the infant while she went out on the town, sometimes returning with a man. Ellie could not suffer such an offense against her personal moral code.

  “Our problems are solved,” their mother said with a smirk.

  Orrie thought it regrettable that sarcasm was his mother’s habitual response to Ellie. Which of course did not justify Ellie’s believing her a murderess. But neither did it help.

  “That’s a good idea,” he said, mollifyingly, to his sister and then, to his mother, “It’s really lousy the way the government is treating you. A man puts his life on the line for this country, and that’s the way they act. I’d better go down there and straighten them out.” He was capable of a vigorous public display of indignation when the occasion called for it: somebody unjustly cutting into the head of a line, for example, or the way a postal clerk would shut his window on someone who had waited a quarter hour to reach it. Once as a passenger in a friend’s car he denounced, at a stoplight, a driver who had dangerously swerved in front of them a mile earlier, a very large football sort of guy, who on Orrie’s complaint climbed heavily out and challenged him to make something of it, and Orrie would recklessly have done it though a head shorter, but his friend was of less stern stuff and sped away. Orrie still believed that a righteous cause gave one the strength of ten, despite the exceptions to the rule that were cited by cynics.

  “You,” said his mother, “are going back to school. You can’t miss any more classes.”

  Ellie suddenly rested her small hand on the back of his. She had never done anything of the kind before, and he was moved. He knew he was defying his mother, but he said firmly, “Not right away. I’m staying around here till we get things back on an even keel.”

  “What things?”

  “Well,” he said, “it was you who had that idea, just now when you told us to come downstairs for a talk.”

  She sniffed and stood up. “There’s one thing more…. As you know, your Uncle Erie owns this house. It was only through his generosity that We’ve been able to stay here.” She turned her back on them and spoke toward the arched doorway to the dining room. “He’s been living in that apartment hotel in the city. It doesn’t make any sense, when this place is his.”

  “He’s moving in,” Ellie said levelly, without apparent emotion.

  “He could just throw us out. Not that he would ever do that, of course, good as he’s been to us!”

  Orrie asked, “He’s moving in?”

  Their mother turned to face them. “Would you prefer that he sell it? He’s had an offer.”

  Orrie could not stay seated any longer. “Then Ellie and I are getting out.” He grasped his sister’s hand, and they both stood up.

  “Sit down!”

  “No!”

  His
mother breathed deeply. “Please sit down,” she said. “Don’t tell me we can’t speak reasonably any more.”

  This sort of approach always appealed to Orrie, who believed in nothing more than reason. He was no authority on international affairs, but he suspected that if someone had spoken reasonably to Hitler early on, there might not have been a World War II.

  But Ellie was tugging at him. “Don’t listen to her.”

  This infuriated his mother. “Damn you!”

  “All right,” he said in his masculine role. “Everybody simmer down.”

  But now Ellie had become intractable. “Not me,” she cried. “No more!” She tore her hand from his and left the room. He could hear her running upstairs.

  “If this keeps up,” his mother said, “she’s going to find herself in some institution. I can’t stand much more of it.”

  “I’ll look after her,” Orrie said with quiet authority. “But I’ll tell you this: I won’t let her live here if Erie moves in.”

  His mother shook her head. “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not making any sense. Where then would she live? She’s not an adult, you know.”

  “The Terwillens have offered her a home.”

  “You must be kidding. That pal of Augie’s, Bobby Terwillen, on the lifesaving squad? He’s got a home?”

  Again the sarcasm, and about a decent man. “Yes,” Orrie said, “and he’s got a very nice wife. They don’t have any children but have a fairly big house, I guess.” He looked down. “Actually, they included me in the offer.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say to me.”

  He looked up but would not meet her eyes. “I didn’t say I accepted.”

  “What is going on?” his mother asked. Now she was more plaintive than angry. “Why would this subject even come up? This is your home. Since when has there been any doubt about that?”