Peter Orner - Esther Stories

Anita yanks out the stop button and sets off the alarm. She pulls off her heels, drops, and sits on her shins with her bare feet facing up behind her. As if they’re on the beach and not in an elevator in the Mercantile Exchange Building on South Wacker. My father won’t sit down. He stands above her, as if literally lording over her will make her stop lording over him in the only way that matters.

Mr. Burman—

The Fiskjohn matter.

Mr. Burman—

He loves her, which is his real problem, though admitting it to himself would take more than even Anita Fanska can muster right now. You come to love in so many ways — the routes zigzag and always turn into lies when you try to retrace them. It’s what Anita likes best about love, the way it twists you, boggles you, and she’s pretty certain it’s here with this angry little man who won’t sit down and join her, but who also lacks the courage to push in the button and stop the alarm. Because what he wants — submission — is so far away from what she wants, this sentimental girl who’s fallen so hard for her boss. She wants to love him in this elevator amid the jangling alarm that sounds like chains being dragged, while custodians scramble and the security guards babble nonsense into their walkie-talkies.

Any people in it?

Moron, you think a rat pulled the alarm?

It’s a chance at love and chances don’t come around so often, and she pats the floor as if all he needs is a little coaxing.

Philip—

But my father stands on the edge of a beautiful abyss and dreams of power. He watches her sweat-glazed arms and doesn’t move, does nothing, which is why the aftermath, the long office August days, will be so much easier for her — because she sat down in that elevator and simply said, Philip, and nothing else.

SEYMOUR BURMAN dreams he’s General Grant writing his memoirs while racing throat cancer. Dreams he is sitting in a wicker chair on a porch at Mount McGregor, New York, a writing board on his lap. Dreams of glorious reams of paper at his feet and of pain in his esophagus so incredible that it feels as if someone is forcing him to swallow acid, the acid like a liquid blade slicing, and yet still he writes, still he remembers, still it all comes back to him in a throb of valiant memories — until everything shoves to a halt like a marching army suddenly stopped and falling backward over itself. It’s time for Shiloh. Shiloh, Shiloh. Little church called Shiloh. How do you write about Shiloh? How do you say you were in a clean-sheeted bed in Savannah, a steamship ride away from your men at Pittsburgh Landing, when the rages of hell poured forth? How do you say 41,000 rebel soldiers — who you knew were only twenty miles away — took you by surprise? How do you say you heard the thunder of the guns during your breakfast and that you finished that breakfast? Your reputation to be riddled like the uniform of another mother’s son from Ohio, and still you chewed on?

Sy Burman asleep with Grant’s Personal Memoirs riding his chest, snoring in his chair in the den on Pine Point Drive. It’s a Sunday in July 1979. The book rises and falls. My grandfather’s hand aches from gripping a pen in his dreams. Grant will never use his voice to speak again. Only these paper words. Seymour, who fought his own war, loves the little bearded hog butcher hero who won the bloodiest war of all, and now he inhabits the veined, shrunken hand that will not confess the debacle of Shiloh. That will avoid it, shunt it, spend what little eloquence is left on less haunted glory. There is nothing like the oblivion that coats memories we refuse to remember. My grandfather shivers with Grant, a blanket pulled up to his chin, a wool cap on his head.

THE MORAINE HOTEL. Highland Park, Illinois. The wedding was absolutely splendid. The bride radiant, unworldly. Guests could look at her for only so long. Whoever saw a dress so white? The way you might shield your eyes should you be so lucky to make it to any place like heaven. Here it was. The Moraine on the Lake. It’s long gone. They knocked it down in the seventies. It was a sprawling white hotel with five sets of colonnades. To proud Midwestern eyes that had never seen one, it looked like a Southern plantation transplanted to our rocky bluffs. All that remains now are the towering oaks and the ravine that used to border the back, lakeside of the hotel, an enormous moat of dead leaves. Esther’s wedding at the Moraine Hotel was splendid. Even now, that’s the word people use, and it’s funny that knowing what happened later can never spoil this vision of perfection. Now the pictures of it are stuffed away. But they pale. They look staged, like black-and-white movie stills. The only way to see Esther Burman’s wedding is to reconjure it. Every once in a while the idea of it, that it happened, leaks, and people who were there are struck by the memory of her. Of course the groom was perfectly irrelevant, which makes people remember him only fondly, if they remember him at all. It was Esther. Every inch of her was glory.

Her mother, Bernice, is fussing in the hall. Esther is standing in the bedroom of the presidential suite. She is wearing a slip and waiting. Her back is to the lake that fills the window. The lake is calm, almost sullen; the waves limp and whiteless. She sees it anyway. She thinks of how even the meekest wave yanks the gravel back and forth, up the shore and back. She kisses her shoulder, not out of narcissism but out of self-preservation. She fears the splendor and the praise. The praise. She already knows to beware of it, to hate it, though her mother eats it, compliment after compliment, like her favorite Fannie May nonpareils, chocolate on one side, beady candy on the other. Bernice, she glows. She positively glows . At the rehearsal, one chuckler waved a half-eaten shrimp in Esther’s face and gabbed: “They can see you from space. The Russians are watching you right now. You could make peace. You could melt even those cold fishes. Send Esther to fight the Reds! Send Esther!”

It could be a chant: Send Esther! Send Esther!

She kisses her shoulder to tell herself, Hold on, wait. Her mouth telling her body not to worry, that this will last only so long. That everything — she already knows this — lasts only so long.

Now she stands with her hands at her sides. Later she will wear long white gloves, something that will occur to her years after as the most ridiculous thing about the entire day. She won’t turn around, only stares at the door and waits. It makes her woozy, the lake. She won’t look at it. She will never look at it. She waits for her mother, who in a moment will bustle in and merrily gasp, “Angel, but you’re not dressed!” Her hands full of a veil that will make Esther think of a heap of white lettuce.

THE FACES of the pallbearers are always the same. Gallant and not trying to seem proud, but at the same time not unproud. That’s the fine balance, and when we hoist, it’s not our muscles but our sorrow lifting, our sorrow straining. My father lifts his sister. There are five other pairs of hands lifting, but mostly it’s him, and he doesn’t imagine her last moments, or any other moments before her last ones. He’s concentrating on his lifting, not saying goodbye, lifting, not recriminating, lifting. He has a job to do, and he’s like everybody else. His hands are no different.

I used to prance around my grandparents’ house on Pine Point Drive in my Uncle Lloyd’s pointy, flimsy army cap, though by that time Lloyd was already persona non grata in my family. Whenever my grandmother saw me in that hat, which I’d found in a dresser drawer in my father’s old room, she’d wince and bite the inside of her cheek and say, “Take that off, Leo. I beg you.”