Peter Orner - Esther Stories

The house on Pine Point Drive was a dirty-yellow-bricked rectangular colonial covered by scraggly vines, as though the house was trying to camouflage itself behind the trees in the front yard. In the back yard was an old swing set, rusted out, one swing cracked in half, the other missing, its two chains dangling. There was also an old wooden boat — even then overgrown by weeds — that was the one thing my grandfather brought north from the old house on Lunt Avenue. The boat was our favorite, and I’d always race my brother to it. We’d start at the garage, run through the garden (with Olivia shouting about her cabbages), and if Alex didn’t trip me, I’d win.

True, her beauty made it easier for everybody, because nobody really had to look at her. It created the distance that nobody even knew existed until much later. But in my family there was also a little boy who grew up to be my father. While everyone else may have loved Esther’s beauty without looking into her eyes, my father saw someone else. The Esther she wanted my grandfather to see from behind his camera. And he hated her. Olivia says it’s because he thought his head was too round and he was too short and because he was older and because nobody ever repeated his name, called him angel, nothing. My father saw only the flawed, scared, restless Esther. The tantrum Esther. The Esther who used to go into fits as late as her sixteenth birthday. Ranting on the kitchen floor, screaming about her hair, and throwing her shoes at Olivia.

What it was between them I’ll never know. I have two brothers, two sisters myself. One of my brothers must have been the dumbest hoodlum in Chicago for five, ten years running. Little Davey Jr. We all called him Dodge. I didn’t speak to him the last year of his life. I might see him again, depending, and if I do, you can bet I’ll call him a horse’s ass to his face, even as I’m kissing it. But Esther and your dad had something else. Like they weren’t ever related. He was, what? Four years older? Since she was little he used to go after her. When your papa was away at the war, it was just your nana, me, and the kids. Your nana loved that girl so much, sometimes she forgot she had a son. Your dad used to follow me around. Yanking my dress. And when he wasn’t pulling on me, he was tugging Esther’s hair like he was plucking weeds, and calling her a liar about everything. That never stopped. Even after she got married — even after he found your mom and was married himself — he still said Esther was a selfish fool. Then he went after Lloyd. Both your papa and your dad thought Lloyd wasn’t good enough for this family because he couldn’t talk as fast as they could. The more your nana went on about his face his nose his cheeks, his being a doctor, the more those two complained about him. But who they were really talking about was Esther.

This one always gets told with a grin, no matter who the teller. How one night Lloyd drove Esther eighteen miles out of Champaign, to a little town called Rantoul. The Rantoul story. How they cuddled up on a mowed-down cornfield with a bottle of wine and a blanket to see how many stars they could count. Lloyd kept a tally on a dollar. But Lloyd forgot to fill up the car after his drive downstate and they ran out of gas coming home at 10:45. Curfew was 11:00. They walked the eight miles back. Mrs. Roachwell standing at the door at half past midnight. Howling: Banned. Banned! Banned for life, Lloyd Kantorowitz!

After the service my grandmother weeps softly into her palm in the front row, grabbing and reeling in with her free hand anyone fearless enough to go near her murmuring grief, her shivering.

My father says now, even now, that he helped put her in the paddy wagon that brought her to the locked psychiatric unit at Rush St. Luke’s out of family duty and love. They brought a white-and-blue-striped Chicago police paddy wagon, and my father, in lieu of her nowhere-to-be-found, soon-to-be-ex husband, helped put her in it out of family duty, out of love, he says. He rips open a sugar packet with his teeth. I know you’d never believe that I did it out of kindness, and I did not. Out of love, because she was my sister and nobody else gave a damn. That worthless Lloyd. You think he cared for a minute what happened to her? After she attacked him with the scissors he knew he had a way out. And then, when he finally did leave, all that screeching and pounding Esther started doing on the apartment walls.

Nana says it was a butter knife.

Listening to my mother. No wonder.

And Olivia said the neighbor’s baby was bothering her, that it kept crying in its sleep.

A baby, bless Olivia’s heart! An old faggot lived next door, Leo! I knew him, a judge, lived into his nineties still chasing young clerks around his chambers. There wasn’t a baby for miles of that apartment. Don’t you get it? What choice did I have? Let her keep at it? You think I wanted to admit — even to myself — that we had a lunatic in the family? Your grandmother wanted nothing more than to let it all go on. She said that neighbor probably was bothering her. She said, What could Esther do but bang on the walls if management wouldn’t listen to her? Don’t you see what I’m up against with these people? But your mother has trained you so well to see me as the enemy in every situation that you can’t, won’t — so easy to judge me now. What could be easier than to judge me now?

Your sister.

My sister, yes.

Lloyd and that dirty little mustache, my grandmother says. Running off with a nurse. Mortifying is what it was. Facts have never been very important to her. Lloyd ran off with another doctor. But wasn’t the leap into another set of warm arms inevitable, a survival instinct? Doesn’t matter to anybody except my grandmother what job she had. A nurse, a little nurse, how obvious. If it makes her rest easier, let her be a nurse. The point is that Lloyd’s leaving gave my grandmother somewhere to put the blame. For all of it. The divorce and the hospitalization. For her, the two went hand in hand.

“Oh, for God’s sake, the man is an adulterer!” my grandmother roared into the phone one afternoon. I must have been fourteen. Olivia and I were watching baseball. She said of course Nana was talking to Mattie Rosenthaler. “A tiff. Little more than a tiff,” Nana was saying. “A husband and wife do that a thousand times a day in this state. And that’s grounds? While he runs off with the Red Cross, the court says her nicking him is grounds?” Olivia shaking her head and clapping for the do-nothing Cubs.

Olivia’s hair has always been white (even in the oldest pictures). The story about her that got whispered is that once she ran away from the family to marry a man. She went to Gary, Indiana, because her husband worked in the steel mills. This was after my father was born but before Esther. She came back after exactly a year. My grandmother said she never said a word about the man, not even his name, but my brother and I used to make up stories about him. We called him Gary from Gary, and said he had arms as long as the antennas on the top of the John Hancock Building.

The week after Olivia came back from being married, Dr. Zaballow slapped my grandmother on the behind and told her she was pregnant again.

Always white except when she wore one of her black wigs, which she did when she bartended my grandmother’s cocktail parties. I can see her laughing at Lloyd and his slippery fingers and even dumber feet. Thanksgiving, 1962. Stooping to clean up the glass and then pouring him another wine. Patting his round shoulders and saying, Doctor, can’t you prescribe something for my aching back? Forty-eight years old and already my aching back. Lloyd gulping and coughing: I’m certainly not a physician yet.