Esther Stories (18 page)

Bernice brought his body home on the Ann Rutledge. A train named after Abraham Lincoln’s girlfriend, a fact that would have sent her father into a convulsion of hosannas: You see, gentlemen, it was Mary Todd who poisoned Ann’s venison. This was in 1863. I was Assistant Secretary of War, and yes, I signed the confession. But hear this! Countrymen! Romans! Ukrainians! I did it because the President asked me to—for the good of the country—and his marriage. How would it have looked? Mary Todd dragged away in shackles? Abe would have rather boxed a thousand Stonewall Jacksons than half a Mary Todd. It was I, I, Louie the First of Fargo Avenue, Rogers Park, who also saved the union.

Her mother never explained herself, and after a while Bernice stopped asking. Seymour said it was simple, that there was no mystery, that grief just undid already-loosened screws. Why dwell on it, Bernice? Leave her be. Why must you always dwell? They gave her the tiny guest room in the house on Lunt. Olivia carried her meals up there and listened to her. Rachel never spoke of the past, only the present. She talked of the way the light looked outside her window and of the temperature, how the cold felt on her arms. For two decades she rarely went out in the street. Philip was afraid of her; Esther told her friends that Grandma Rachel smelled like a wet raccoon. One day, in 1956, she finished her soup and died.

Bernice watches the February sun retreat from the bay window that looks out upon the slope of the ravine and the skeletal winter trees. The new house so huge and still around her, she can’t help feeling like an intruder in its silence. And what kind of house is this if her mother doesn’t live upstairs?

The vision appears slowly in the gray doom of the enormous window. It’s a kitchen in Arkansas. A room she saw for less than an hour, so long ago now it happened to someone else, when she went to retrieve the papers, the photographs, the little furniture left to salvage. The sad black man who answered the door and didn’t move his head when she told him the news. The dirty kitchen walls and the chair by the soiled bed. The filth. The filth is what startled her the most, that her mother had let it all go—

In the window her mother, barefoot and in a loose house-dress, hovers over the bed. Her father is so shriveled under the blankets, his body is nothing more than a small lump. He’s wearing a hat, a brown derby, that swallows his head. Bernice can’t see his face. She watches her mother lean closer and sees everything. Her mother’s bare feet, the grease-smudged walls, the cloudy window above the stove with its crack, a yellow fissure in the upper right corner. The lump that is her father, that hat. Feels her father’s soft wheeze in the hollow of her mother’s throat.
Tell me
something, Louie, a lie, a bamboozle. Anything.
Her mother waits.

The author wishes to thank the James Michener–Copernicus Society of America and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa for a generous fellowship, as well as Rhoda Pierce, Rob Preskill, and Dantia MacDonald for immeasurable faith and support.

In 2013: Thanks to two legends of publishing, agent Ellen Levine and editor Pat Strachan, for, among so many other things, helping this book to see the light of day, again.

And to Ricardo Duranti, great Italian translator and dear friend.
Il prossimo anno a Mompeo.

Peter Orner is the author of the acclaimed books
Love and Shame and Love
and
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo.
Orner is also the editor of two books of oral history,
Underground America
and
Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives.
His work has appeared in
The Best American Short Stories
and been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Orner was born in Chicago and now lives in San Francisco.

Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Love and Shame and Love

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Underground America

Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean
Lives
(coeditor, Annie Holmes)

“Beautiful.…Think Saul Bellow (Chicago setting, rollicking Jewish-style comedy) mated with Chekhov (unassuming, devastating detail), set to the twangy thump of early Tom Petty.…Orner is the rare sort of writer who not only exactingly paints life’s bewilderments and suffering, but induces the experience itself in the reading.”

—Ted Weesner Jr.,
Boston Sunday Globe

“This novel, about a white American teacher in Namibia, has the same sort of episodic structure, lyrical prose, and completely hypnotic effect as the novels of Michael Ondaatje.…It’s a gorgeously written book, very funny, and bursting with soul.”

—Dave Eggers,
The Guardian

 

  

“Like Amy Bloom and Charles Baxter, Orner has a gift for revealing how the tragic and the mundane occupy equal berths in our limited mental space.…Because Orner is constantly adjusting the aperture on his writing,
Esther Stories
compresses a magnificent range of detail into a small amount of space.…With an elegant, understated intelligence,
Esther Stories
illuminates how even the most heroic family tales can molder and darken with time.”
—John Freeman,
Chicago Tribune

 

“The subtle arc of these stories, moving through several years and conflicting points of view, achieves an elegiac tone, even as Orner renders the details of family intimacy with sweet precision: the old matriarch who, one day in 1956, ‘finished her soup and died'; the family failure, whose black sheep status was confirmed forever when ‘he sired only daughters.'”

—Gail Caldwell,
Boston Globe

 “There's startling intimacy in every story of Peter Orner's debut collection,
Esther Stories
—startling because of the immediacy with which Orner's characters confront us and because of the range of feelings they express and the secrets they reveal.…Orner's range of subjects and characters is as impressive as the depths of his sympathies.…Peter Orner is that rare find: a young writer who can inhabit any character, traverse any landscape, and yet never stray from the sound of the human heart.”

—Judy Doenges,
Washington Post Book World

“These are stories of unusual delicacy and beauty, and this is a remarkable collection.”
—Charles Baxter

 

“These stories go from fragmentary to big novella-length investigations of family (there's a brilliant section about a family in Fall River, Mass., Lizzie Borden's hometown), and they feature unusual points of view, strange narrative structures, and lots of compassion. I wish my first book had been this good. I suspect that if Orner proves as successful with the novel as with the short story, we're going to hear a lot about him. If he remains a writer in the short-story miniature mode, he's going to be one on the scale of Grace Paley or Lydia Davis, I imagine. I was stunned by a sentence or two in every one of the works in
Esther Stories.
”

—Rick Moody,
Hartford Courant

 

“
Esther Stories
is a rare and original collection.”
—Joan Silber

 

“There's a strange, elegant grace to Peter Orner's short stories, a characteristic rarely found in such a debut. Orner writes like a wise old soul, re-creating the past and its people with skill and apparent ease.…Sometimes he speaks softly, but you'll never forget what he says.”
—Connie Ogle,
Miami Herald

 

“Taken individually, these precise, poetic stories have a spare and haunting wisdom. But taken as a whole,
Esther Stories
is like a dreamscape—the small ache in your soul is balanced by a luminous compassion for all the beauty, love, and folly that comprise the human condition. If the short story was in need of a future, it has been found in Peter Orner.”
—Dennis Lehane

 

“You can see why the stories might be dangerous. They are sharp and frequently without mercy. Lives often boil down to a pile of clothes or worse, explode in the sudden violence of long-repressed pain.…In the story ‘Esther Stories,' the narrator swirls through his aunt Esther's fall from beauty to misery like a conjurer, like a wizard flipping through images in a crystal ball. And the slightly blurred edges don't make this story any less brutal.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds,
Los Angeles Times

 

“A spirit of passionate tenderness broods over these stories. It is as if love, transcending itself, has become a wisdom so perfect it must cherish everything—grace, of course, and awkwardness too, and innocence, and guilt, and haplessness. And, yes, clear-sighted and unhonored loss.”
—Marilynne Robinson

 

“Orner doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls…but all would be in vain were it not for Orner's mastery of language. He moves, seemingly effortlessly, between plain speech and more elevated diction, between short, flat sentences and sinuous, long ones.…Best of all, Orner is a true democrat…every character, young or old, well-to-do or broke, maimed or whole, is worthy of the author's insight and eloquence…brooding, mysterious, ineffable, beautiful.”

—Margot Livesey,
New York Times Book Review

“Orner shows a deft touch for evoking domestic discontent and less often, domestic triumph…charged with poignance…an impressive collection.”
—Dan Cryer,
Newsday

 

“Orner's finest treatment of his grandfather's storytelling legacy turns up in a story called ‘Walt Kaplan Reads
Hiroshima,
March 1947.' In it, a 4-F former air-raid warden sits down with John Hersey's
Hiroshima
and finds himself utterly unstrung by what he finds there.…By now Orner's left himself completely out of the matter, and the result may just be the gem of an already very distinguished collection. It's the story some of us have waited a lifetime to read—that of a reader's page-by-page encounter with a book, and of the change it makes in him. One might think the annals of literature would be filled with stories on a theme presumably so dear to writers everywhere, but for some reason that hasn't been the case. This leaves the field to Orner, and does he ever make it bloom.”

—David Kipen,
San Francisco Chronicle

“Some of Orner's very short stories are the best of that form that I have read since Isaac Babel's.”
—Andre Dubus

 

“Although many of the stories in Peter Orner's first collection of short fiction are only a few pages long, their emotional breadth is extensive, as is their geographical range.…Subtle and leisurely, many of the stories echo the stately despair of
Mrs. Bridge,
Evan S. Connell's classic 1959 novel.”

—Donna Rifkind,
Baltimore Sun

“
Esther Stories
marks the debut of a major talent.…Orner's shortest pieces run only a paragraph, while his title story fills out thirty pages.…All reveal him to be a writer of impressive thematic, geographical, and generational range. To excerpt a sentence or two here would be to dismember. His stories deserve, and
need,
to be read in full.”

—Jae Won Chung,
Philadelphia City Paper

“In my opinion, Orner's stories could be used as near-perfect examples of how much a few words can convey. He is also a master at endings, never closing the story shut but wrapping up just enough to leave you satisfied. There is so much more here to talk about, but by far the best thing is to get hold of this book and experience it for yourself.”

—Tania Hershman,
The Short Review
(UK)

“That's not despair talking, but good old Jewish rakhmones. ‘Sorry' reminds us that there are those out there who need our compassion. There is ‘sorry' in Orner's beautiful tales, as well as grace and luminous poignancy.”

—Debra Darvick,
The Forward

“Peter Orner is already a master of very short stories and of longer, highly detailed chronicles of families and relationships, bringing his readers into their world with his tender and passionate prose. Whether taking on a man who ponders ‘what you wish for and can never have' or a woman who grieves ‘enough for everybody,' Orner constructs worlds of violence and madness, guilt and innocence, and love and grace. In all his short stories, Orner illuminates one of the most elemental principles of fiction—making what is known uncommon and arresting.”

—Citation for the Hemingway Foundation/
PEN Award (finalist)

“Orner is a master of time: many of the stories in this collection are no more than three pages long, but they can span a moment, an afternoon, or half a lifetime. Orner's gift is for knowing the one irreconcilable fact of a character—the lone hope, grief, obsession, or prayer that became that character's fate.”

—Lacy Crawford,
Narrative

“This extraordinarily fine collection should establish Orner as a new star of American short fiction.”

—
Publishers Weekly,
starred review

“Peter Orner's very moving fiction collection,
Esther Stories,
presents us with lives viewed through a lens that defaults to close-up. They delicately reveal the gossamer-thin webbing that attaches us to our histories and to one another. Humane, subtle, and startling in their understatement, they have been carefully built, sentence by sentence, until ordinary lives become transcendent.”

—Citation for the Rome Prize from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters