Orrie's Story (3 page)

Orrie corrected her. “She
lent
it to me. It's full of oil paintings by Rembrandt and others. God, I've never yet even painted the right kind of water color.”

“What's the right kind?”

“Not muddy! I'm hopeless.” He ducked his head.

“No, you're
not!”
cried Ellie.

But with justifiable self-righteousness, Esther said, “There you are. You're probably not cut out to make art more than just a hobby. If you become a doctor you'll be able to buy all the art your heart desires.”

He was irritated. “Buy? That's not the point. I like to make things of my own.”

“As a doctor, you'll make people well,” said she. “That's the greatest kind of making there is.”

Orrie not only loved his mother. He honored her judgment. When the time came for him to go to college, though the actual departure was unpleasant, she had the comforting knowledge that he intended to take the premedical program of studies. The matter with which she had had no success at all, however, was in persuading him to be more friendly with E.G., and that was unfortunate, insofar as Orrie's conception, unlike that of either of the girls, happened during one of those periods when Erie was in town. He was gone again before Esther knew she was pregnant and did not return until Orrie was half grown, at which time E.G. first entertained the suspicion, since become a conviction, that he was the boy's father.

The returning hero was touched to see a homemade banner draped across the top rank of bottles: WELCOME HOME, AUGIE. It seemed to be part of a bedsheet, lettered probably with a shoe-polish dauber cap.

Behind the bar as he was, facing the door, Herm naturally saw Augie before the others did, and without telling them why, suddenly demanded silence.

He lifted the glass of ice water he always kept under the bar and said, “Here's to your friend and mine…” Because he was staring over their heads, by the time he had pronounced Augie's name they had all spun around on their stools.

Rickie Wicks stepped down and was first to shake Augie's hand though he had not been that close a friend before the war, whereas Joe Becker, who of all those present had known Augie best, was the last of the men to greet him and was least demonstrative though not for lack of regard.

Augie, still holding his suitcase, nodded at the ladies. “Hi, Molly. Hi, Gladys.”

“You look fine,” said Gladys. “Just fine, with the ribbons and all.”

Molly wore a little smile that just barely raised the corners of her mouth. “You leave any live Germans behind to clean up the mess? Or did you wipe ‘em all out?”

It was dispiriting to Augie to find her with the same sarcastic manner she had displayed prewar. Not much was left of Molly's looks now, but when they had been in high school together, she was, if not exactly pretty, attractive, to a painfully shy kid like himself. At least her skin had been clear. They became pals, walked home together, and routinely consulted each other on homework. His parents called her his “girl,” and he himself began to think of her that way too, but when he finally got the nerve to take her hand in that phase of their homeward route when they cut through a little stand of trees where no one would see, she drew hers away as if it had been burned, made it into a fist, and shook it at him. He got the bizarre feeling that she believed him a pervert, as if she had been a boy with whom he tried to hold hands. From then on his feeling for her changed. In return she became wry. Not all these years had changed her.

Herm had drawn him a beer. “We'll go in back for lunch after a while. It's on the house.” He handed the mug over, then said, fingers twitching, “Let's have that valise.”

Augie gave him the suitcase, which Herm stowed behind the bar.

“How's that stack up with German brew?” asked Rickie Wicks.

“A lot better,” Augie said, having taken a swig. “Can't beat
anything
American. You learn that right away wherever you go.” He spotted his postcards fastened with yellowing Scotch tape to the lower right corner of the back-of-bar mirror, and pointed. “Hey, you kept them.”

“Proud of you, Augie boy.” Herm leaned into the bartop. “Now tell us about them ribbons.”

When nearsighted Bob Terwillen began to examine them at close range, Augie identified the most important.

Al Hagman called down to Joe Becker at the far end of the group, asking him whether he had ever seen a Silver Star. Joe said he had not, but stayed where he was.

“Must have been darn rough.”

“Let's put it this way, Al. I didn't do any more than any of you would have done in my place.” There were good-natured jeers of disbelief.

Molly shrieked, “Since when are you gettin' so modest?”

Terwillen hoisted his glass. “Here's to you, Aug. God bless you. Just glad you got home without leaving any part of yourself on a foreign field.”

Later they all except the women, who professed to have duties at home (Glad had to feed her cat), went into the back room where meals were served and ate lunch, Augie's being a thick T-bone steak smothered in onions and paid for by the others (each chipping in a quarter; on the way home later on, Hagman reflected that Herm had made money on
that
deal). The rest of them ordered the blue plate: today, hash topped with a fried egg. The high point of this phase of the celebration was when Herm's wife, Gwen, who was the chef, brought out a layer cake that Rickie Wicks had got from the local bakery not an hour earlier, with just time enough for the baker to do a rush decoration job: stock rosebuds of frosting, much the same as used for weddings and birthdays, around the rim of the top, but framing “Welcome Back, Augie,” handwritten in edible red script, beneath which was planted a miniature paper replica of the American flag.

Nobody asked Augie for particulars of his combat experiences, though he had been prepared to give such from what he had learned frequenting a bar near a big Army hospital down South where wounded veterans returned from foreign action to recuperate. He had bought the officer's uniform and captain's bars and ribbons from the legitimate owner thereof who had lost heavily at craps and poker. Any genuine holder of a decoration could obtain a replacement from the War Department if the original was lost or stolen, so nobody had been deprived.

At the time the United States got into the war, Augie's business had failed and his wife was having an affair with his cousin. He was in no position to make trouble when it was only by means of the same relative that he avoided bankruptcy. Only some desperate measure could save him. Harold Banks's son Jerry, often on the wrong side of the law, had escaped prosecution for a series of petty thefts from auto-parts stores by agreeing to join the paratroops, and Sam Potter had a boy who enlisted in the Navy to evade final exams as a high-school senior. The war could be used for your own ends if you were young enough, but Augie was no kid. It had taken him a while to realize that the mere appearance of joining the Army might serve as well as the fact. All he really had to do to establish the premise was to leave home. Esther was unlikely to send the police to fetch him back, involved as she was with Erie, and certainly not if Augie sent her regular amounts of money in the guise of G.I. family allotments. That he might be able to get away with the imposture made the idea at first the more frightening. He had not previously been the least daring in any area of life. He had married Esther because she was the only girl who would go to bed with him. He had inherited the store on the death of his father.

But what of the children? He was closest to golden-haired Gena, who was just at the threshold of womanhood. He had little in common with Orrie, who had always been more Esther's son than his own. It was possible that Orrie would never be one hundred percent masculine: he seemed averse to certain male pursuits by nature, for example, hunting and football. When tackled gently by his father, a very young Orrie burst into tears as his little body hit the grass. It could not have hurt; the boy took worse spills all day long. Later on, when old enough to go out for high-school teams, Orrie was saved by his size, having not then grown beyond five-four and a hundred ten pounds. As for hunting, an unfortunate thing happened the first and only time his father had taken him for pheasant. Augie brought down a bird with a poor shot that only disabled a wing. The creature dragged itself into the undergrowth and when discovered, with heaving body and the anticipation of death in its glittering eye, was admittedly not a happy sight for a normal hunter, let alone a squeamish youngster. But much of manhood consisted of dealing with responsibilities irrespective of prevailing conditions. Bagging game was to bring meat to the table. To put a wounded thing out of its misery was a human obligation. Augie opened his clasp knife and, working as quickly and mercifully as he could, cut off the pheasant's head. Wiping the knife on the ground and his hands on the legs of the old pants he wore when hunting, he heard Orrie running away through the field.

Later on, in the car, Augie said, “If you think hunting's wrong, then you oughtn't eat meat at all. Because this is the kindest way any animal can be put to death. You know how fhey kill and butcher cattle?” But like so many of the moralistic (most of whom were women), Orrie wanted to indulge himself in easy emotion and not to face the issue.

Not long after Augie went presumably to war, Gena had herself run away from home and had never been heard from since. Esther wrote him a vicious letter in which
he
got all the blame. As if Gena had needed another example than her mother to go wrong! Augie as it happened did not take such a bleak view. He thought it likely that the girl had gone to Hollywood, to try to become one of the blonde stars like those whose movie-mag photos she clipped out and pasted on the wall over her bed. Gena was pretty enough for the screen, but you needed more than beauty to succeed there, as you needed more than brains to make a go of business, which Augie had discovered the hard way. You needed luck. He had never had any—until he began to make his own.

He had got off the bus in a Southern city that offered a choice of defense-industry plants, all of which were eager to hire workers, no experience asked, and pay them what on the heels of the Depression were remarkably generous wages: on an aircraft-engine assembly line, with overtime, he was soon making in excess of a hundred dollars a week, more than twice what only yesterday would have been a nice income. His room, in a house of such, was overpriced by a rent-gouging landlord of the kind that was created by wartime, costing half a week's pay per month, and he had to eat most of his meals out, except for canned soup heated on a hotplate that was illicit on those premises, running his expenses even higher, for you could not fill yourself up at supper for much under six bits. But he spent little on anything else except nightly beers, and was able not only to send Esther a monthly “allotment” that was equivalent to the one the government would have paid, but also put something aside in the form of war bonds, for which an automatic deduction was made from his paycheck.

After three and a half years, he was prosperous relative to what he had been hitherto, and he had found a good woman as well, though she was in years but a girl, having left school as soon as she was legally able to do so, to work in the same plant as his, wearing women's powder-blue overalls and hair tied up in a Rosie-the-Riveter kerchief. Augie had met her in the company lunchroom when an apple she dropped rolled right up to his heavy work shoes.

Though her hair and blue eyes were reminiscent of Gena's, in character Cassie could not have been more sensibly down-to-earth. She too had accumulated savings and rapidly was overtaking him though having started work later than he and not receiving wages as high. But her expenses were almost nil, her parents refusing to accept more for room and board than twenty dollars a month and taking that only because Cassie threatened to move out if they did not. Like them a devout churchgoer, she neither drank nor smoked and was not supposed to dance but was sometimes prevailed upon to do so by Augie, not someplace in public where they might be seen, but in her own home, to radio music, when her parents were out. Even so, it bothered her conscience to be doing a sinful thing in their own domicile, behind their backs, and it took all the feeling she had for Augie to gratify him in this way, which aside from some closed-mouth kissing was the extent of their physical association. In the earliest phase of their friendship he once tried to touch her clothed breasts but had been so decisively rebuffed that he never even attempted anything below her waist.

Here he was, more than forty, father of three, married to a whore, in love with a nineteen-year-old virgin with whom he had no fleshly connection. He sometimes thought about the possible absurdity of the situation but never questioned the rightness of it for his peculiar wants. Cassie was the perfect antidote to Esther. And beneath that truth was the more plangent reference to Gena. He could only pray that his daughter had not, wherever she was, come to grief, that she had a lover as kind and gentle and fatherly as Cassie's.

With great trepidation, he had, in the old-fashioned way that seemed appropriate, asked Cassie's father for her hand before applying to the girl herself, and Mr. Pryor, a truck mechanic who had not gone to high school, assented eagerly, seeing Augie as a sound man and a step upward in culture, and asked no uncomfortable questions. When Augie did propose to Cassie, he was already furnished with a ring as well as a plan for their future together: using their combined nest eggs they would take a mortgage on a little house in the same neighborhood in which she had lived all her life, or as near as possible. Two bedrooms would do, one for them and the other as a nursery for the children. For his part, he would give up the drinking of any liquid containing alcohol, but (with a squeeze of the hand and a wink) he probably would like a slow waltz with his wife now and again, with the shades lowered if necessary.