Orrie's Story

by Thomas Berger

  “Well, I’m staying,” he said, with a certain sense of shame, for if she had challenged him on the subject of Erie, he would have had the courage to tackle the matter of Gena. But as it stood now, how, out of the clear blue sky, could he bring it up? He had never in all his life said one word about sex, even the normal kind, to his mother. What pretext, what provocation would he need to air this perverted thing? And yet neither could he continue to evade the issue.

  “When’s he moving in?”

  His mother sighed and sat down in the chair. He had to admit she did not look happy at the prospect. He had always avoided thinking too much about her relations with Erie—quite a different thing from the matter of Gena—because there was really nothing he could do about it one way or the other. It was really his father’s business, and his father had run away to war, deserting them all.

  She said, “He wanted me to tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted to know your reaction.”

  Orrie threw his arms in the air. “For God’s sake, a lot he cares about that!”

  “Don’t talk that way,” said she. “You matter most with us all.”

  There was an element in her tone that touched him, even though he could assume it was the kind of sentiment a mother believes she must voice on occasion. He rubbed his nose. “I don’t see that it has much to do with me.”

  She was ill at ease. “Well, it does. He’ll need a room, and of course with you at school…”

  For an instant Orrie was almost happy: that was the pitiful truth. Only now did he realize that he had tacitly been assuming that Erie would move in with her. He shrugged. “As you say, it’s his house.” But then he hardened. “I’m not going back to school yet.” He patted the sofa beneath him. “I’ll bunk on this.” He spoke quickly to counter her imminent objection. “No! I’m going to do this my way.” He sprang to his feet. “When’s he coming?”

  His mother’s expression was grim. She too stood up. “He wanted first to hear your reaction.”

  Orrie shook his head. The idea that anyone would seriously ask for an opinion of his was novel indeed. He might have been flattered had he believed for a moment that Erie was sincere, even though he could not have identified a likely reason for the man to be hypocritical in this instance. Why should Erie curry favor, now that he was their only hope? Orrie was never a cynic except when it came to Erie: nor could he have explained that state of mind. He was about to leave the room when his mother detained him. She indicated the box that occupied the place on the drum table which had always belonged to the vase. “Would you ask Ellie if she’d like to have these?”

  She had correctly assumed that he himself would have been embarrassed by the offer and was therefore careful not to make it to him.

  His sister could not be found anywhere on the second floor, yet he had not heard her leave the house. The only place left then was the attic, which could be reached through the last door at the end of the north side of the hallway, and then on up one straight flight of stairs. It was the kind of place he would have adored as a younger boy, but they had not lived in this house until he began adolescence and was too old for hideouts for make-believe.

  Ellie was there now, examining a collection of pieces of luggage, all pretty old and shabby: he had already helped himself to the best of the lot when he went off to college.

  “You’re getting prepared to move to the Terwillens’?” he asked disingenuously.

  She shook her head. “But I’m getting out of this place.”

  “You’ll have to get past me first.” Orrie histrionically squared off before her. “I’m not letting you hit the road.”

  “Then come along.”

  “Maybe I will be ready for that when the time comes, but —”

  “For God’s sake, he’s moving in! What time are you waiting for? Isn’t that the limit?”

  The fact was simply that Orrie still could not make up his mind as to what he should do, but he could no longer afford to let her know that, for she would only consider it as a weakness—which perhaps it was.

  “If we leave now, though,” he said, “he’s won, hasn’t he? We don’t have anything on him but your word. Not that that’s not good enough for me, but it isn’t enough to take to the police. If we stay, we can keep him under surveillance. If we do it the right way, I mean not too obviously, he’ll be lulled into a sense of false security.”

  He lowered himself onto a middle-sized trunk that had come down from one part of the family or another.

  Ellie began to like the idea. Perhaps she had seen the same movie he had taken it from. She sat down alongside him. “If only,” she said, “we could plant a secret microphone someplace where they would talk.”

  Orrie knew she was quite serious. To give her something to think about, he said, “You know you can listen through a wall to conversations on the other side by means of a water glass: you put the bottom of the glass against the wall and the hollow end against your ear. It really works.” As a high-school student he had once seen some of the other guys doing that on the wall between the respective locker rooms of the boys and the girls, though apparently nothing memorable was heard.

  Ellie nodded. “But it still would not be legal evidence, would it, unless it could be recorded somehow? It would just be my word against theirs. And they’re adults.”

  He could see she was not going to make it easy for him. “Maybe not, but what it would do is confirm your suspicions. I mean, if you heard Erie talking about murdering Dad, you’d know you were right that he did it.”

  Ellie leaned away from him and said, with spirit, “I don’t need anything like that. I know they did it, both of them.”

  He found it chilling when she spoke in such a fashion. To change the subject, he said, “Mother thought you might like to have Dad’s ashes.” It was out before he realized how inappropriate a subject it was to bring up just now.

  But as it happened, Ellie’s reaction did not seem negative. “I’ll get something nice to keep them in, something really nice.”

  He preferred her in that mood. “Remember Mr. Swayne, who lived next door to us when we were in the other house? Once his brother came back from a visit to Cuba and brought him a box of expensive cigars in a real cedar box. He gave me the box when the cigars were gone. It had a nice smell of tobacco and real cedar. I loved that smell. I still have the box, keep just junk in it. After all these years it still has that great aroma, real masculine, you know? You can have it if you want.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Ellie. “But I’ve got some money from birthdays and Christmas and all.” Some of this came from Orrie himself. When she was younger he had given her girls’ books about horses, nursing, and the like, but nowadays, being pretty ignorant in the area of the tastes of high-school females (except for those of which he disapproved, e.g., pretty-boy crooners), he gave cash. “Friedman’s has some handmade brass boxes from India.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult you,” Orrie said soberly. “The cigar box is real cedar. I didn’t mean I kept junk in it that’s really junk. My debating medal’s there and some cufflinks that belonged to Grandpa and a snapshot of all of us, when you were a little bitty kid, at Lake Mohocan, Gena and us all.”

  “I’ve got some old pictures of Daddy,” Ellie said. “I found them in here.” She pointed down at the trunk on which they sat. “She put everything to do with him in there, just as soon as he went away to the Army. She never wanted him to come back.”

  It occurred to him that Ellie must have spent some previous time in the attic. Near the dirty window that looked onto the street were an erected card table and folding chair. On the tabletop was a stub of a candle, stuck with wax into the inverted cap of a pickle jar. At the other end, away from the window that gave onto the back yard, pushed as far as the sloping beams of the roof allowed, was an old mattress that looked scarcely thicker than a quilt.

  “You use this place?”

  “Sometimes,” said she.

&
nbsp; “God!” He rose. “I’m sweating like a pig right now, and it’s not that hot a day.”

  “Neither was it the day that Daddy supposedly put on the fan before he took a bath.”

  He did not care to hear anything more on that subject at the moment. He went to the front window.

  Ellie said, “If you want to save anything of Daddy’s, you better take it, because one of these days I just know she’ll throw everything out now he’s dead.”

  Orrie examined the window and saw that it had a movable sash that could be opened to let in air. He slid it up. But there was no screen.

  “Do you really stay here all night?”

  “I tried it, but it gets too hot on sunny summer days. Also the mosquitoes get in.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have to move up here for a while anyway. Erie’s taking my room.”

  “That son of a bitch.”

  Orrie was enraged. “I don’t want to hear you talk like that! I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. Listen, I swear I will! You’re not too old for that.” There was little he detested more than a foul mouth on a female of any age. He had once had a crush on a little blonde named Donna May Waters, but lost it when he heard her utter an indecency in a nonextreme situation.

  Ellie made no acknowledgment of his admonition. She said, “I naturally thought he’d shack up with her.”

  This was not much better than her previous comment, even though it echoed an earlier assumption of his own. He renewed his glare. “You really ought to try to be more ladylike and not use the smutty language of G.I.s. Erie’s got a right to move in. The house belongs to him.”

  “That’s right,” Ellie said nastily. “You just go around taking his side.”

  A big horsefly zoomed past his left ear, sounding like an airplane. But a person could suffocate up here with the windows closed. Ellie tried his patience. “You ought to watch your mouth. She said she might have to send you away.”

  “Good! I can’t wait.”

  But in the next moment his heart went out to her. “Come on down to the kitchen. We haven’t had any lunch, if you noticed. I’ll make you a fried-egg sandwich with ketchup on it, just the way you like ‘em.” When their mother was away at weekend lunchtimes, but once in a while even when she was there, it would be Orrie and not Ellie who prepared the food. He could not cook anything but fried eggs, so it would be those, or cold cuts or canned soup. He found it gratifying that these were the only times he ever saw his sister eat with apparent satisfaction.

  “I got the funeral guy to open the coffin,” Ellie said. “I took Daddy’s ribbons to keep. They would just have got burned with the rest of him. You think that was okay or was it, uh, sacrilegious or something?”

  “It was okay,” said Orrie. “Dad would have wanted you to do that.” It was the least he could say.

  The way she had been sitting on the trunk, she might have been a little old lady with back trouble, but she sprang up with energy. “I’m going down to get Daddy’s ashes before she dumps them in the garbage.”

  The abusive statement provoked no remonstrance from Orrie, who was weary now. He had chided her enough for today, with absolutely no visible effect.

  Ellie stopped at the head of the stairs. “You shouldn’t be the one to move up here. You’re now the head of the family. I want you to take my room.”

  “No,” he said, “I like being up this high.” It was true, though it had only just occurred to him. Looking out the back window, he could see the sturdy branch of the old elm, which he had never before realized, in his earthbound way, was so tall. Some of its limbs seemed to go on past the peak of the roof. Beyond the Mencken yard was an uncultivated area of weeds and the trashy kinds of trees that might actually be bushes or vice versa. Orrie could vaguely remember his father’s talking about how smart it would be to buy that land and make it into real-estate lots, but he had not had the money, in fact only moved to this house because he had none. It was definitely on the wrong side of town, less than three blocks from the river and the broken-down buildings along the shore, some of which were hardly more than shacks. The people who lived there were said to be a mixture of Indian, Negro, and degraded white stock. The men fished for a living and performed odd jobs. The women allegedly did some whoring but refused to hire out as household help—in any event that was what was said around town. Orrie had no personal experience of them, though in fantasy he had been seduced many a time by voluptuous, swarthy harlots in waterfront hovels. Some of the more supposedly “advanced” high-school boys claimed to have lost their virginity in that fashion, for the price of two bucks each. But those boasts might well have been empty.

  The ritzier part of the river was downstream, toward the city. As a younger boy, Orrie had once promised his mother he would become rich one day and buy her a house there. Gena, still home then, said that too was a slum compared with Beverly Hills. She had saved a Sunday rotogravure article on the stars’ homes and could not wait to go out there and take the bus tour.

  No part of the river was visible from the back attic window. Beyond the area of potential vacant lots was a quarry full of enough rainwater to high-dive into, though it had been denied to local boys by a chain-link fence since one of them drowned there a few years earlier. Had it been accessible to Orrie, he might not still be without sexual experience, for there had been nighttime skinny dipping and everybody knew where that could lead. He was a good swimmer and would have been emboldened by the darkness. Of course Gena was a veteran of the quarry at an early age. His father had punished her for such indulgences, confined her to her room, but Ellie told Orrie their sister climbed out the window and down a trellis to the ground. So far as their parents went, Ellie held her peace. He had heard guys say girls could never hold a secret, would always spill the beans, sell you out. Not Ellie, even with her hand in the fire! But necessarily he owed his first allegiance to their mother: that was a natural law.

  He liked being at a height, he who was shorter than most. Up here he was not so defenseless. He could be attacked only via the bottleneck of the narrow stairs, could hold off an army, taking them on one by one. But ventilation could be a problem. Ellie was oblivious to matters of that sort. He tried to open the back window, but it was stuck too tightly. Something with a blade was needed to be run around the sash. He went to look among his father’s possessions.

  The trunk was seasoned with wear, but, unlike those shown in movies, devoid of stickers from glamorous steamships and oriental hotels. When Orrie made a lot of money he planned to live in an altogether different way from that of his family. In that aim he was at one with Gena though he shared none of her tastes for the flashy. When he traveled, all would be perfection, his companion a wife of exquisite grace who wore a hat and gloves everywhere and effortlessly spoke the languages of the places visited—as of course, by then, would he.

  Just inside the trunk lid was a segmented tray, the compartments of which held an inexpensive pocket watch, some tarnished cufflinks, tie bars, a ring or two, a mother-of-pearl penknife, the kind of thing his father when home and alive surely kept closer at hand, presumably in the bedroom. With its short and slender blade, the knife was useless for Orrie’s current purpose. He removed the tray. In the belly of the trunk was folded clothing, but folded without care for the configurations of the garments. Nor had precautions been taken against moths. Fortunately he had borrowed that suit-jacket of his father’s during the senior year in high school, when his dad’s civilian clothes still occupied the far left end of the closet in the master bedroom, the other side of which was used for his mother’s coats, and perhaps the fumes from the mothballs in the pockets of the latter were strong enough also to protect the clothes at the other end. In any event, the jacket suffered no damage. But the first item he now removed from the trunk and shook out of its crumple was a pair of navy-blue trousers that below the fly had been well perforated by the insects, who had gone on conspicuously to damage every formerly wearable garment in the collectio
n except the neckties, a thin leather belt, and a pair of pigskin gloves.

  He could use a tie or two. He sensed that Paul did not think much of the plaid one that was his own favorite simply because there it was, always hanging conveniently around the neck of the same hanger that held the jacket. He could use the belt and gloves as well. His current wardrobe for the winter to come was a three-quarter-length corduroy coat, lined with rayon. He dug deeper, looking for the thick woolen overcoat he thought he remembered, and as he did, he felt, not ghoulish as at first he feared he might feel, but really closer to his dad than he had in years, perhaps ever, for clothes are souvenirs more poignant than pictures and much more so than most letters with their received phrases and stilted sentiments.

  No overcoat could be found. Maybe his father wore it when going off to war. After all those years, Orrie could not remember offhand which season that had been. But had the Army kept the garment? There was so much about his father’s matters that he did not understand, beginning with why his mother so despised the man. Why had his father failed at business while Erie prospered? And he did not even know exactly what business Erie was in. It was supposed to be real estate, but then why didn’t he buy the land between the house and the quarry and make lots from it? That nonsensical events were commonplace in life went without saying: what was inexplicable was that some of them had enormous consequences while others remained curiosities without implication, and he at least could not tell the difference until it was too late.

  At the very bottom of the trunk he found the double-barreled shotgun his father had used that long-ago day to wound a pheasant. Orrie could not bear to watch him put it out of its misery by hand and had run away across the field. That was not the only reason why his father thought him less than manly, but perhaps it was the most memorable. “You eat meat,” his dad had said on the drive home. “But you let someone else kill it for you.” He had realized at the time that the charge was just, but there was nothing he could do about it. At any rate he would not have eaten a bite of the pheasant, even if his mother had cooked it, which she did not: she threw it into the garbage, didn’t know how to roast it, wouldn‘t have done so if told; food came from the store, not the great outdoors. And Orrie wondered, though did not ask, why kill something when you know you’re not going to be allowed to eat it? Was that manly?