Orrie's Story (15 page)

“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?”

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.

“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 girls 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.