Orrie's Story (2 page)

E.G. said he had known returning soldiers reckless enough to bring along unexploded hand grenades. But how to detonate one of those without bringing down much of the house as well? There were obvious objections to nonmilitary means: hit-and-run by car (hard to set up without being seen by
someone
), murder by an armed robber (a crime unknown in their town), an assisted plunge down the cellar steps (might, with a healthy war hero, result only in some bruises), rat- or weed-killing poisons (even if undetected by the victim, how had they got into his food or drink?).

Esther became more savage as the quest proceeded. She now professed to be furious with herself for not doing away with him before he had gone off to war—and so saved Gena's life.

“A kid her age, hitchhiking by herself on a highway.” E.G., next to her in the tourist-cabin bed, closed his eyes. He was not hearing this for the first time, but it had to be said. “She wouldn't have run away if he hadn't suddenly decided to join the Army. I couldn't do anything with her whea she heard her Daddy had left. He always pulled the wool over those girls' eyes. They thought the world of him, no matter what. Like it was me who had anything to do with him going bust with the store.”

Now E.G. showed anger. “Don't remind me of that. You know where the money should have gone. My dad never forgave his.” The grandfather he and Augie had in common had been outrageously biased in favor of Augie's old man and against E.G.'s own, leaving the latter almost nothing when he died but providing the funds for Augie's father to open the five-and-ten at the edge of the business district. It had never done well during what was left of Theodore Mencken's life, in later Depression days, but when bequeathed to Augie it lasted only another two years. Of course Augie complained that he had inherited more debts than assets, but to Esther, and E.G., the reason was simply Augie himself.

On Augie's death the U.S. government would be obliged to pay the beneficiary of his G.I. insurance the sum of ten thousand dollars.

They finally settled on the plan only the night before Augie was scheduled to come home. He would die in the bathtub, by electrocution. An end-of-the-summer heat wave was in progress. It would not be unreasonable for an electric fan to be operated in the poorly ventilated bathroom with its one small window over the toilet, which furthermore could not be opened wide and still provide privacy. The fan might easily be dislodged from the rickety shelf high on the wall at one end of the tub and fall into the water below. On the other side of the wall was the master bedroom: a sudden blow against it, at the right spot, would do the job with dispatch and without incrimination.

“Ellie has got to be in the house,” said E.G. His chest was covered with ape hair. Augie's was not nearly so hirsute, but, at least the last time she saw him, he had a full growth of hair on his head, whereas E.G. showed a long spear of skin where each temple joined the crown. Augie was taller, and actually better-looking in most particulars when taken superficially, but there was no authority in his weak chin and his brown eyes were soft as a dog's.

E.G. pointed a finger at her: it was his ringed pinky. “The timing has got to be just right.”

“Okay, he's in the tub. So I listen till the water stops running. I go in the bedroom then and hit the wall at the place where we measured and —”

“No, first, before all of that, you went to the bathroom and moved the fan to the front of the shelf.”

“That's right.”

“And switched it on.”

“Okay,” Esther said, “I would have done those things…. So how long before I can go in and find the body?”

“Depends,” E.G. said, “if he makes any noise or not. I still say we ought to try it with a stray dog or cat, see if they make any noise. My guess is someone doesn't when electrocuted. I think they're paralyzed immediately.”

Esther had a special regard for animals: she could never have agreed to experimentation of that nature. “All right, so if he makes noise, I'll go in right away. But if he doesn't, as you think is probable, I'll wait awhile.”

E.G. had lighted a cigarette from the pack on the table at his side of the bed and now blew a spurt of smoke at the ceiling. “I got to be someplace where I'll have a good alibi just in case somebody might think I have a connection with this. So I'll be at that bar where he always hung out. You know, the Idle Hour. When it's all over you first call me there and ask for a Mr. Reynolds. The bartender won't recognize your voice, will he?”

“I never set foot in that place,” said Esther, taking the cigarette from him and drawing on it.

“Then you call the ambulance. I'll give them time to get there before I show up. Everything's got to happen in the right order. If you call the ambulance first, there might be some reason why you can't get through to me, maybe somebody's tying up the line.” He pointed again. “When things go wrong it's because accidents haven't been allowed for.”

E.G. had had no education beyond high school, but he was naturally shrewd. In acumen he made up for what had been lacking in his father, who had been so outwitted by Augie's dad. In the sons the situation had been reversed. While Augie was failing, his cousin had done very well. Precisely what he did remained mysterious to Esther, though she knew he had some real-estate interests among others. By contrast Augie on the slightest pretext would run off at the mouth on the subject of his own failure: he had softheartedly given too much credit; the wholesalers who distributed brand-name merchandise would deal only with the big chains, leaving the little guys like himself, in those days before Pearl Harbor, with made-in-Japan crap; the high-school kids whom he hired after school and on Saturdays were never of the caliber of those who set up pins in the bowling alley or caddied, he couldn't say why, though it was obvious to Esther that the reason was he did not pay enough. But she would rather have cut out her tongue than say a word about his store unless asked, and of course never would he have done that. She was only a woman.

“So you show up just about the time they're carrying out the body.”

“Yeah,” said E.G. “It'll still be early enough for a visit under ordinary circumstances. What would be more natural than me showing up to welcome my cousin home from the war? And lucky I got there then, what with this tragedy, a time when you need all the help you can get.” He reached for the cigarette in her right hand, his left forearm across her breasts. Both of them were naked on this unusually warm night for September.

With one hand Esther placed the cigarette in E.G.'s lips and with the other she pushed his fingers down over her belly and into the damp thicket between her thighs. In a moment, still with the cigarette in his mouth, he had flopped her over as if she were weightless and entered her forcefully from behind.

* * *

Next morning, after Ellie finally took her wan self off to school on the two-mile walk she preferred, even in bad weather, to riding with her uncle, Esther repaired to the bathroom to run through the procedure by which her husband would be electrocuted. There was an immediate bit of bad news: the temperature had fallen significantly throughout the night, which could have been expected, but as yet the air gave no suggestion that it would soon rise again. They had counted on another scorcher that began early and by afternoon would make an oven of the bathroom and so make obligatory the use of the electric fan.

But E.G. had warned her against capricious pessimism. “It's a sound plan, as long as we don't lose our nerve.”

Like Ellie, Orrie ignored Uncle Erie as much as possible. E.G.'s holiday gifts, always in the form of cash, were invariably transferred by the boy to his mother, without deductions. She preferred to believe her son was being more generous to her than negative to her lover. But no such interpretation was possible when he spurned E.G.'s offer to help with college costs.

“What the scholarship doesn't pay for, I'll get waiting tables.” Orrie's tone was causelessly bitter, and his chin was at a defiant thrust that Esther found disrespectful.

“Hell, Orrie,” E.G. said, elaborately opening his wallet, “I've got some portraits of Ben Franklin here, burning a hole in my pocket.” He began to extract and wave hundred-dollar bills, one by one. A couple of those would cover dormitory room and board all year, which was more than could be said for the job Orrie had been given by the college employment agency. The scholarship took care of only tuition, with a modest allowance for books.

“Go ahead, Orrie,” Esther urged. “Uncle Erie means it.” E.G. began a movement that might have ended in his forcing the bills into the boy's shirt pocket, had not Orrie backed up violently and balled his fists.

Infuriated, Esther shouted, “Don't you act like that!”

Orrie gave her one contemptuous stare and left the room, and not long afterward, without saying a decent goodbye, the house itself. It was by accident that she glanced out the window at the right time to see his departure for college, the shabby old suitcase of his father's in hand and, worse, wearing the jacket to one of Augie's old suits, a salt-and-pepper tweed, so out of style it was belted in the back. Orrie had the pathetic belief he could get away with this as a sportcoat when he wore it, as now, with a pair of green corduroy slacks that scraped the ground at his heels, in an era when the prevailing style for young fellows was “pegged” pants, the cuffs well above the shoes.

She was about to call to E.G. to come and have a look but was suddenly restrained by a feeling of loyalty, affection, and an uncomfortable pity for her son, which she soon enough however converted into a more convenient hatred for the father who had selfishly run off to war to try to prove his manhood while leaving wife and children behind to fend for themselves.

That had been several weeks earlier. She had not expected soon to hear from Orrie, given the nature of his leaving, and she did not. But he had already written twice to Ellie. Esther intercepted both letters, read and destroyed them. This was done to retain her power in the house, but she was not without a more tender emotion. She genuinely loved Orrie and therefore could be wounded by him, and she knew he loved her in return, and not just, conventionally, as a mother. They had always had profound affinities. Even when Augie was at home, Orrie displayed a marked preference for her company and a notable lack of attraction for his father's pursuits. After the boy had rejected a series of invitations to rabbit hunts, big-league ballgames, and shows in which stunt drivers crashed through burning walls, Augie wondered about Orrie's virility.

“He ought to get out of the house more, have fun like a man.”

“He's a child.”

“He's started his teens,” said Augie. “I hope he likes girls.”

Esther was pleased to notice that Orrie never displayed such an interest in her presence, not even when the Burchnal kid, two backyards away, sunbathed her precociously developed body in shorts and halter. “That girl's really a mess,” Esther had said to her son, who had given every evidence of not disagreeing.

To Augie she protested. “I don't want him coming home with a disease from one of the little chippies around this town. He's going to get somewhere in life!” Which of course was to make more of an attack on her husband than to express a hope for her son, though she was sincere enough as to the latter: she wanted Orrie not simply to succeed in the monetary sense, like his uncle Erie, but to have prestige of the kind that E.G. did not enjoy. She was aware that E.G. had no real friends but herself, whereas everybody professed to adore Augie—while taking their trade not to his store but to the nearest Woolworth's. People were such rotten hypocrites. E.G. was right in his conviction that fear was a more useful effect to evoke in others than affection. Nevertheless she did want Orrie to be a man of unimpeachable esteem, and that meant, in peacetime or war, anywhere in the world: doctor.

Orrie had winced and shaken his crewcut fifteen-year-old head when she first mentioned that. “God. Touching sores? All that blood? Getting coughed in the face?”

“They get used to those kind of things,” said Esther. “It soon becomes just a job like any other. But you don't have to be a family doctor. There are all kinds of specialties, and they pay a lot more besides. Not all of them would be so bloody. What about the doctor who mainly takes X rays?”

Ellie intruded. “Or a nut-doctor. You know psy-uh—” Her mother told her to be quiet.

Orrie continued to grimace. “We're cutting up a frog now in biology, and I don't like it very much.”

“Doctors are honored everywhere they go,” Esther said. “Because everybody needs them. The President needs his. People will look up to you, Orrie. The greatest and strongest men in the world must obey their doctors.”

“But Orrie wouldn't like making people take medicine,” said Ellie. “He wants to be an artist.”

Esther glared at her. “I thought I just told you to shut up.” She resented Ellie's implication that he might be on closer terms with his sister than with the woman who gave him birth. She turned to Orrie. “I know he
thinks
that's what he wants to be at this point, but he hasn't yet had to face the world. Who's going to buy your art? The people around here don't even know what art is. They hang up calendars they get for free. So you go to the big city: who do you know there? And unless you know somebody, you're not going to get anywhere. They don't give strangers any breaks. The day of the free lunch is long gone.”

“I don't know what I'll be in the future,” said Orrie. “I just like to draw.”

Ellie would not be stifled. “Mrs. Taviner hangs all his pictures up in the art room. You ought to see them.”

With his usual modesty Orrie said, “She puts up a lot of stuff by other people, too. It's just a school in a little town.”

“She gave him a book!” cried Ellie.