Orrie's Story (6 page)

“Don't go away mad,” Esther said now, her voice falling off on the last word, her eyelids lowering as if of their own heaviness. She was almost touching him with her luxurious body, and had to step back two inches to make room in which to raise her hand and run an index finger, with a nail conspicuously too long and colored maroon, across his ribbons.

“So you really were good as a soldier.” She raised her dark eyes. “Did you kill a lot of them?”

He could remember the answer to a similar question he himself had put when buying the uniform from Captain Delaney, the debt-ridden officer who had earned the ribbons: “It's hard to tell, at the usual range.” The captain had gone on to explain that, at least in the sectors in which he had seen action, hand-to-hand fighting was much rarer than you would think from motion pictures. But Augie suspected that Esther would not be impressed by the modest truth.

“It's not something I like to talk about. It's not nice and neat, like the movies.”

“Nothing is,” said Esther, looking intently at him.

At this moment he lost everything he had gained in four years, and of course she saw that immediately.

“Go take a quick bath,” she said, and made a gesture as if pushing him slightly though not making actual contact. “I'll wait for you in our bedroom. We've got lots of time. She stays late at school today.”

Augie found the bathroom to be what it had always been, small and without cross ventilation. And without a shower, which is what he really wanted, being in no mood to lie back and soak, then scrub…

Esther burst in without warning. “You'll need this. It's a warm day.” She turned on the electric fan on the shelf above the end of the tub; its wire went to the female plug that had replaced the bulb in the old-fashioned wall sconce that was supposed to supply light to the alcove.

He was embarrassed though having as yet removed nothing but the officer's tunic, which he had hung on the corner of the linen-closet door.

She quickly left, but her intrusion had broken his rhythm. He now could not evade a horrified reflection on what he was doing. He was no longer as drunk in the mind as he had been only a few instants before, but, absurdly, his physical coordination now began to fail. He almost fell into the tub as, trying to balance one leg at a time, he struggled with his trousers. Apparently no one noticed that the uniform was not an exact fit. The jacket was a size larger than his, and the pants, of the same heavy, beautiful twill, though buff as opposed to the dark olive of the tunic, were slightly too long, touching the ground at the heel of the plain brown shoes he had had to buy separately, Captain Delaney not having had boots to spare.

He would bathe and shave and change into the civilian clothes from the suitcase he had brought along to the bathroom. But it was clear that he must leave immediately thereafter, even if it meant not having seen Ellie. He could not conspire with Esther in his further unmanning. He began to run water into the tub.

Outside the bathroom door Esther was listening to the water filling the tub in which her husband was to be electrocuted, when who should appear at the top of stairs, frightening her for an instant, but E.G. Luckily the same water noise that had deafened her to his coming would have obscured the event from Augie.

She rushed to him, pressed his elbow, whispered and pointed, and led him downstairs and back to the kitchen, where, though now distant from their intended prey, she continued to speak in an urgent undertone.

“How did I know when he'd get here?”

E.G. was snarling. “Why'd you let him start the bath already? I told you to wait till Ellie got home!”

“He was ready to
leave
. He wants a divorce! He's got a girl he wants to
marry.”

This information did not have the visible effect she anticipated. E.G. simply stared at his watch. “Here I am: my alibi is gone now.”

In the kitchen they were directly under the bathroom, and the running water was more audible there than in the upstairs hallway. That the tub took a while to fill, what with the constricted flow through the corroded old pipes and faucets, was no longer to be deplored. Esther hated this house. Augie had lost the home she loved: for that alone he deserved punishment. But whether she could impose it upon him was another matter.

She touched E.G.'s wrist. “I don't think I can do it. I thought I could when it was only planning, but I can't.”

“Sure you can. It's only hitting the wall. There's no blood, no mess. He won't even get hurt. We've been all over that.”

“I can't do it.”

He slapped her face so violently that she felt the single blow as a series, each more savage than the last. For a moment of horror she assumed he would go on striking her till she was dead.

But in fact the single blow had not been repeated: she was aware of that truth all the while she rushed towards doom in fantasy. It gave her a perverse satisfaction to believe that, so ready to murder someone of his own blood, E.G. was capable of equivalent treachery towards her, to whom he lacked any but an emotional connection.

However, his eyes were suddenly warm again, and he even wore a slight smile. “Settle down. You can do it.”

And miraculously she knew she could. She had perfect license to focus her resentment, from whichever source, on Augie, who could conveniently represent all that was despicable in men, including their inevitable resort to brutality in moments of crisis, even though in banal reality her husband had never come close to doing such, was notorious rather for crimes of omission, but what did particulars matter when there were so many reasons for killing him? The pity was that he had not brought along his virgin, that saintly little whore, to share his fate!

She looked radiantly at E.G. “You're right.” She wanted to fondle him but was concerned that he think it too sentimental a gesture and evidence, no matter what she said or what she proceeded to do, of implicit weakness. Her strength was what had held him over the years. He could have had a younger woman. No doubt he had had, did have, would have many to take, meaninglessly, to bed. There was some reason why he had been attached to her. She liked to think it was her resolution, her courage, her self-respect: her strength.

She turned to head upstairs, and just as she did so the sound of running water ceased. The silence changed everything. She had never before killed anything of warm blood. As a child she could not bear to watch her father take the live chicken, raw material for Sunday dinner, to the elm stump and gorily behead it with the same hatchet used for kindling, and even worse, though the bird was then beyond feeling, plunge the body in boiling water to loosen the feathers. Nevertheless, within two hours she was savoring a drumstick, in the self-righteous conviction that she should be provided for, irrespective of the measures required.

She appealed to E.G. once more, even though she might be struck again. “Can't you do it?”

This time he was not violent but simply contemptuous. “He's
your
husband, not mine.”

Just as she reached the foot of the staircase, the nearby front door opened hesitantly and Ellie entered, hugging a brown grocery bag with her usual lack of grace, her eyeglasses slipping down a shiny nose.

The arrival served to distract Esther from brooding on relative mortalities. “It's about time.”

Ellie protested. “It's early. They let me go early because my dad's coming home.” With the usual resentment of voice and expression she directed part of this statement towards E.G., without having acknowledged him in any other way.

“Your father's upstairs,” said Esther, extending a hand to restrain the girl from too passionate a reaction. “He's taking a bath at the moment and can't be bothered.”

“He's
here?”

Esther winced. “Keep your voice down. He's tired. He's been drinking. He needs peace and quiet. You can see him when he's ready.”

Ellie shook the grocer's bag. “There's nothing much here but baloney and toilet paper. What are you going to give Daddy for supper? Shouldn't I go back to Harriman's and get something nice?” She did an awkward little dance step of elation. “I can't believe he's
here!”

While Ellie was speaking, E.G. moved out of her peripheral vision and was making signs to Esther. Augie might be out of the tub if she did not get up there soon.

“Uncle Erie is taking us all out to eat. Now get that stuff put away.”

“The toilet paper,” said Ellie in her annoyingly high-pitched voice, “goes in the bathroom.”

At first it had seemed that the interruption and delay had provided Esther with an extra moment in which to develop a resolution for the work at hand, but by now the anxiety had returned.

“Later,”
she cried. “Get in the kitchen!”

She hastened up the stairs and into her bedroom. She went to the western wall and removed the framed picture that hung there, a print of an idealized hayfield in sunshine, thatched cottage and cart in half-shadow and no persons. By careful measurement E.G. had determined that the blow should be aimed dead center in the rectangle of clean wallpaper left when the picture was gone.

Esther made a fist and with its heel, as she had been instructed to do so as not to break bones, struck the wall with all her force. Something happened on the other side: there was a distant sound, muffled, unidentifiable. That electrocution was the cleanest sort of killing was why it had replaced the barbarities of hanging and the firing squad.

Esther left the bedroom and hastened to the bathroom door. Ear against a panel, she could hear nothing from within. She went downstairs.

E.G. lingered in the front hall. He did not look at her until she had reached the ground floor, and even then his face was expressionless.

“Be on my way,” said he. “Be back later, after Augie's rested up.”

“Wait a minute,” said Esther, but her voice was too feeble to be heard by Ellie back in the kitchen. When she tried to raise it, what emerged was a kind of squeak.

E.G. responded to the emergency, but he sounded synthetic in the extreme. “Oh, he'll be down soon? Well, all right then, I'll hang around.” If she had spoken too softly, his voice was much louder than normal and the words were enunciated as if being directed to the sort of family dog that has a passive vocabulary of three or four terms carefully pronounced.

Esther tried again to be heard, but her throat had closed so tightly now that it was all she could do to suck air through it.

Once more E.G. stepped in, but no more convincingly than before. “Maybe he went to sleep in the tub?”

Esther was humiliated to be in such a condition. It was so unfair: she had performed well in the hard part, had done the killing to perfection.

She had raised her finger to make some such point, though perhaps not in so many words, when Ellie came from the kitchen, carrying an armload of toilet-paper rolls.

“We're always running out, so I got some extras for a change.”

Anger unlocked Esther's voice. “Oh, for God's sake.”

“It'll be used,” Ellie said prissily, clamping her bony chin on the topmost roll, to secure it, but too late. The cylinders seemed to explode from her grasp and went everywhere.

Esther lost control. “God
damn
you!”

“Nothing broke,” Ellie said. She stoically gathered up the rolls one by one and made two equal stacks on the second step.

Toilet paper was kept in the bathroom closet. Esther suddenly recognized that this supply gave her the excuse she needed. “All right,” she said when Ellie had retrieved the farthermost roll, that which had tumbled as far as the umbrella stand. “I'll take them from here on.”

“I'll help,” said Ellie, but was driven away with pantomimed slaps. Grimacing, she said, “What's wrong with you? I'm going up to my room, anyway.”

“Just go then,” Esther told her. This too was reasonable enough: Ellie's room was on the other side of her own, farther from the bath. “Just don't disturb your father.”

Ellie shrugged and ascended the stairs, E.G. had disappeared into the living room. When the girl was gone Esther squatted to embrace the toilet paper, two stacks of three rolls each, and balancing them, rose and went upstairs. It took some doing to lower her burden without mishap against the wall alongside the bathroom. Perhaps because of this distraction
she omitted an essential feature of the plan and did not
knock at the door and through it loudly ask Augie whether
there was enough hot water—only then, receiving no answer
, was she to go within and find the body.

Instead she entered without pretext.

Chin lowered onto his chest, Augie was bleeding slightly from a gash in his scalp. The electric fan had never reached the water but had rather struck him on the head, bounced away, pulling its plug from the sconce, and hit the floor, where it now lay on the side of its deformed wire cage.

Still, if he was dead, what did the details matter?

He groaned.

Esther found, amazingly, that her first feeling was of relief: she could never be charged with a murder that had not occurred. This was followed immediately by anger with herself for not so positioning the fan that it would have missed Augie's head as it fell—though she now could see very well that it could not but strike some part of his body, for he filled the width of the tub. The plan had been defective, the plan that was an original creation of E.G.'s.

For an instant she had been alone with the problem, but now she left the bathroom and hastened downstairs.

E.G. stood in the living room, staring out the bay window from which they had watched Orrie leave for college. He did not turn to greet her arrival.

“Christ,” Esther said. “He's not dead. He was just knocked out when the fan fell on him. What do we do now?”

At last he looked at her. “Nothing.”