Esther Stories (16 page)

My brother and I have already helped our grandparents into the dinghy, the small motorboat which will take us from our mooring, in the middle of the harbor, back to the dock. My father offers Esther his hand. She waves him off—saying she doesn’t need any help. Then her foot tangles in the lifeline and she trips, falls into the boat, lands in the dinghy kid’s lap. My father does not laugh, only says, “Jesus, Esther, I told you and now look, you killed the kid.”

“Fuck off, Philip,” Esther says mildly.

My father steps down into the boat and sits next to me. We sway. He faces Esther. He says, “I work my ass off, taking you out here. Buy you lunch. The whole time you sit—and now you talk to me like dirt. You think I’m dirt?” Esther stares at him. Then she opens her little yellow purse and takes her wallet out. Yanks a twenty-dollar bill, balls it, and throws it at my father. We’re puttering along in the boat now, all six of us squeezed, knees mashed together. The ride lasts no more than forty seconds, from my father’s boat to the dock. My father flings the money back at her. Esther picks it up from the dirty puddle of brown water between them. They are both in their forties. I am twenty-three and home from college and hot and sweaty and want off this little boat. My grandmother wears a white headband and a plastic visor. My grandfather dons his navy cap. My grandmother yawns loudly. My grandfather feels his breast pockets for cigarettes. Though I cannot see my brother’s eyes—he is sitting behind me—I know he is reading for the thousandth time the names that are printed in wavy letters on the sterns of boats bigger than my father’s.
Unfazed, Wilmette, Illinois. Part-time Lover, Chicago, Illinois.
Again, my aunt throws the soggy money back. It lands in my father’s lap. He picks it up again, crumples it. This time it hits Esther’s shoulder and she leaves it. Now she stares over the boat at the oily water slushing into small white waves. I don’t look at my father, whose face is splotched red, watching the money. I grab the bill and stuff it in my pants, and half-mutter at the dinghy kid, who looks about twelve: “In this family you pick up the crumbs.” But the kid doesn’t laugh, knows this isn’t funny. He knows it should be, but there’s something about these people that makes none of it funny. This ignoring older woman in white and the daydreaming captain. These two graying, infantile throwers, brother and sister. When Esther noticed the money was gone, she looked at me and said, “Split it with your brother.”

Oh, those people couldn’t tell you you have a cold. But they shuttled her around for tests. And then more tests. Tests tests. You wouldn’t believe how many hospitals there are in Chicago where you can get a test. Enormous hospitals ten blocks long you never even heard of. Finally, Reed Mental Health Center. Out near Palos Heights, wherever that is. They gave her a nice room. It had wallpaper, cream-colored. They tried to make it homey, and I give them credit for that. Say what you want about those people, and of course they’re all monsters, but that’s what they get paid for. Her diagnosis changed every week. The liars. But even so, they treated her well, and Esther…You know how Esther is in any social situation, even after all that. She organized things. A drama club. Gave piano lessons. She led nature walks. A troop of foot-dragging loons following Esther by a couple of feeble trees, and Esther would say, That’s a Dutch elm, that’s a white birch. She didn’t know any more about trees than I do. Certainly no one wanted it to happen. And your father? No. I’m going to leave him out of this—he did what he thought was right, and there was no arguing with him. But once it happened, I was against it. Understand that. Remember it. I went to the court and screamed at the judge, and they had to practically carry me out. One of the police officers whispered that if I wasn’t careful I’d follow my daughter to the bin. Times were different then—if he said that now I’d write a letter to the governor and get him fired. But finally it was better for her. I’ll say that. The drugs, yes. But also the stability. At Reed she didn’t have to carry herself. Go to the store. Visiting her made the whole thing look tempting, let me tell you…And she didn’t hate me as much when she lived there. Of course you know that changed, and she let me know the devil she thought I was. Don’t care about anybody too much, Leo. You aren’t doing them any favors.

“I don’t feel the kicking anymore.”

“You’re just getting nervous because it’s close to the time.”

“Lloyd.”

“It’s not unusual for the movement to lessen toward term. Many studies have shown—”

“No shifting. Nothing. A week ago it was kicking and now—”

“It’s normal. Don’t get upset. I’m telling you.”

“No. I don’t feel any kicking.”

Because he refused to stop loving her. Not because she was jealous. Not about who he was screwing in the linen closets at the hospital. I watch Lloyd watch the spot at Pritzger’s where they took Esther’s casket away. With all the people who knew her chatting quietly, respectfully…After the baby died. Because he assaulted her with his optimism and his willful infuriating blindness. This I don’t need anyone to tell me across the kitchen table over coffee. That screaming, that jabbing. Because Lloyd couldn’t see that the death of her baby was punishment for giving in so easily.

It’s what he could never understand. He thought she’d settle into her life because that’s what people did. He bumps shoulders with his new pretty doctor wife, but doesn’t feel her. He hears his wife conversing with the little French woman. Their words mean nothing. Twelve years since he last saw Esther, but the wall that time built has always been hollow.

They released her after ten months. (My grandmother had been telling anyone outside her closest circle that Esther was traveling abroad.) The divorce decree gave her next to nothing because of the evidence of physical abuse. She had nowhere else to go, so my grandparents gave her Olivia’s old basement room, the room Olivia had slept in during the four years she lived in the new house before she retired and moved home to the city to live with her sister full time. My grandfather got Esther a job at a credit bureau in Wheeling—she’d always been strong with numbers. At my grandfather’s urging she’d been an accounting major at Illinois (although she never got a degree). Everyone was grateful that numbers seemed to come back quickly for her. After six months at home, she even bought a car. She was thirty-nine when she moved back in with my grandparents. She told my grandmother she was going to move out soon, but she never did. By all accounts she got along well at work. Her employer—a thick-necked man who kept honking into a napkin—spoke lovingly of her at the funeral:
She was the one everyone in the office went to. You see? Esther understood things, outside-of-work things.
She made a few friends and used to go out for drinks with them at the Wooden Nickel in Highwood. At home, she was silent most of the time. While my grandparents no longer hosted parties, they often went to them. On some weeknights Esther ate dinner with my grandparents, but most nights she ate alone downstairs. Soups out of a cup heated in the microwave. Simple salads. Noodles. She never appeared on holidays. After the money toss on the boat she refused outright to go to my father’s house, and would not come up from the basement if he was present, so I rarely saw her during those years. I do know that she read considerably during the last eight years of her life. I often noticed gaps on my grandfather’s shelf of Harvard Classics. Writers like Hugo and Dostoevsky were often missing, but also the other names—the ones I’d never heard of—were gone too:
Valera, Björnson, Daudet, Kielland, Musset.

I remember she came into my grandfather’s study once while my brother and I were over. My father wasn’t around. She sat silent. I watched her scan my grandfather’s bookshelf as we sat and talked, and my grandfather laughed, leaned back in his swivel chair and told us his own most famous story. I was too old for the war, you understand? But that wasn’t going to stop me, no sir. Signed up for the local Coast Guard out of a sense of duty, a man has to have a sense of duty. And so they sent me out to search for Hitler’s submarines in the Calumet River on the southwest side! This was the part of the story when, on cue, my brother and I had always laughed when we were younger. We did that day, too. My grandfather pointed at us and shouted: But no, boys! I didn’t laugh! I went—patriot that I was and am—and scoured every inch of that river for sauerkraut. Ha! Did such a good job they sent me to the South Pacific. I watched her not listening, never listening—how many times had she heard all this?—looking over the books. She was plumper and shorter, it seemed, almost squat, but her face was still the face of Esther Burman from the high school photographs. The high-arched eyebrows, small mouth, tightly pulled-back hair. She was wearing new white running shoes. Suddenly she stood. She waited until we all stopped talking and looked at her. Then she left the room without a wave or a nod.

And some weeknights during those years, my grandfather would shut himself in his study with his Scotch and the
Tonight Show
and Esther would blame my grandmother for everything. Slam the microwave door and say, Look what you created. And my grandmother would sit at the glass table in the kitchen (out the window, in the dark, my grandfather’s little tomato garden) and whisper, I only wanted the best for you. Only the best, but even your father (and what does he ever notice?) knew that Lloyd was a nothing and I should have known, too.
It’s not Lloyd, Mother. It’s never been Lloyd. What’s it going to take for you to understand?
But running off with a nurse like that. It’s enough to make you retch.
That you insisted. It’s not what you insisted on that ruined me.
I never forced. You make it sound like I had a gun to your head.
I didn’t say force. Christ, if you forced I might have known better than to listen to any of it. Any of it!
And then, this is what my grandmother told me, Esther would know that was wrong, that they were both wrong about everything, and she would start to shriek. Then the shriek would turn into a gagging laugh that sounded like choking, and in his room my grandfather would stand and turn up the volume on Johnny Carson.

Esther’s grave lies next to her daughter’s. The gray markers are flush to the grass, modest, but solid. The man in the cemetery office tells me that they are made of pressure-tested granite from Barre, Vermont. “It’s a perpetual stone,” he says.

With my index finger I smooth away the dirt from the valleys in letters.

Beloved Daughter and Mother

And yes I want to say something. I hadn’t known that I would, but I do now. That one way of looking at you, and what I know of you is that so much of your life was a begging off and a begging off until—that was the cruelty. That when you finally dared, you lost.

“So Esther knew before it happened?”

“Not for certain. How could she have known for certain? I suppose she couldn’t have. But yes, a month before, she called me—not crying—and said, ‘Mother, Lloyd says everything is fine, that they often stop moving, but I know. A mother knows.’ She was right.”

Esther Burman died of breast cancer on October 27, 1988. It was fast and deadly, and my grandmother drove her to the hospital every other day for treatment and finally, to stay for good, and Esther screamed and swore at her because she didn’t want to die in spite of what most people thought. A cruelty of the cancer was that she was so drugged she couldn’t read novels. My grandmother sat in the silence as her daughter stared at the turned-off television. Another hospital, this one a normal one—one she could tell people at the club about—but so much worse.

Like my father, I never went to see her in that last hospital, either.

I stand in front of Olivia and her sister’s house on West Van Buren. Late October 1989. Most of the leaves have fallen to the little brown lawn in front of the house, a low bungalow squeezed between two squat brick apartment buildings. A couple of boys on bicycles chase each other down the street. Olivia shouts from the screen door. Her sister Mag hovers behind her with a plate heaped with brownies and cookies and chocolates. I hug Olivia hard; she is still strong and feels—like she always did—pillowy and starchy. Her white hair pulled back tight and there is far less of it. A hollowing, some sinking below her eyes, makes me want nothing more than to curl up with her and just lie there. She’s laughing. Her sister’s laughing. Leooooooo. Olivia yanks me into the house and pushes me into a puffy chair and sits down so close our knees and feet touch. The living room is crowded with chairs; the coffee table has been taken over by framed photographs. So many relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and I never knew a single one. The blinds are half drawn. Thin lines of dusty afternoon light crisscross the room.

“Esther’s dead,” I say.

“You think I was born last Tuesday? I know Esther’s dead. A year ago this month she passed.”

“Nana didn’t want to upset you.”

“Upset herself! The business of that! I raised the girl. Upset me!”

“Nana was so devastated. She couldn’t even think—”

“You’re telling me about it? Now she calls me twice a week to cry about it. But don’t think I didn’t give her a taste of lip for not telling me about the funeral. What do you want to protect an old woman from? What haven’t I seen already? You’d think nobody ever died on me, with that woman calling me with news that’s not news anymore.”

“That poor girl’s life,” Mag says. “Ravaged.”

“Nana couldn’t even walk into the funeral home,” I say. “We had to hold her up. You know what it would take for her to accept help like that.”

Olivia nods slowly and laughs a little. “Sometimes she went around like she never had a housekeeper her whole life. That woman. I can see her. Grieving enough for everybody.”

“She calls to talk about Esther?”

“Yes, twice a week. Some days I put the phone down on the counter and just let her go on. My ears get tired. I do the crossword. Ask Mag. Sometimes three times a week.”