Peter Orner - Esther Stories

“Working, Mother. You know he’d be here if he wasn’t working.”

“So much love I’m choking.”

Rachel sits, rests her hand on the kitchen table. Bernice takes a step backward, away from her mother. In the other room, her father booms.

They drove down there in a truck Manny, the junk dealer, lent them. Manny knew he’d never see it again, but it was the least he could do for Louie. Although even Manny, who’d always been the block’s optimist, couldn’t help thinking it would be more a hearse than a Dodge humpback in no time. Rachel drove. Louie sat beside her and told stories of the first time he laid eyes on her, at that ball at Baron von Rothschild’s summer palace in Venice. How Rachel arrived in a white silk dress on the arm of Napoleon’s other son, Felix, the blind one, the one history books ignore. And me a cobbler’s son from the ghetto in Pilvishki sneaking a peek at you.

She got the café up and running in ten days. It so happened that a man was selling his place, a first bit of luck that made her think the potion of the waters was already working. Two afternoons a week, sometimes three times, when they had the money, she took him to Bathhouse Row. They went to the Quapaw because it was slightly cheaper than the other houses. It wasn’t nearly as opulent as either the Maurice or the Buckstaff. But even the Quapaw was grander than anything they’d ever known in their lives, and Louie reveled in it. The vapors! The robes, the white towels, the Negro attendants in their impeccable shirts and scratchy bath mitts. Amid all the steam and the whiteness of the porcelain — who’d ever seen such white — he’d descend into the glory of that water. Tiny Louie scrubbed and dried. Louie from Rogers Park rubbed down by masseurs calling him Mister this and Mister that. He’d emerge from those baths a new man, singing the praises of the robber barons. The fat men, the fatter men. Who’d ever seen such obese men? Lord, these thieves know how to live! Bring back Hoover! I take back everything I ever said about their greedy child-killing hands! Hail the captains of industry! Hail the lying tycoons!

But he got worse. Faster than her worst nightmares foretold. Of course she knew he would, but she’d prayed to God, beseeched God. For once in my life, make me wrong about something.

Inside of six months in Arkansas, Louie could no longer hold a saucepan. He slept in a little bed in the kitchen by the stove. Rachel would sit in a chair beside the bed and watch him shake in his sleep. All night she’d watch him. She wrote to Bernice: “His body’s too small for this. There isn’t enough room for it and him.” The only person they saw then was an old black man who lived in the basement. His name was Edwin Edwidge, a name that made Louie cackle and call him a liar. Edwin made his living sweeping sidewalks, but mostly, he told them, I’m a widower, which nobody pays me for. He often brought up coffee because he liked to listen to Louie’s stories, and Louie couldn’t get enough of the man because he always guffawed long and hard before a punch line had even entered Louie’s head.

After she closed the café (she didn’t wait for a buyer, just locked the door, didn’t bother with a sign), they no longer had the money for the Quapaw. So Rachel took him to the government bathhouse, the free one. No velvet between your toes here. No copper tubs, no mosaic domes either. A flat low building, looked as if it was trying to hide. Rachel had never seen a building so ashamed of itself. She bit her lip and cursed God for creating America as she signed the pauper’s oath on Louie’s behalf. The ultimate humiliation of the poor: confessing it to a sneering clerk. She could have spit on his nose. And she’d wait outside on a wooden bench and watch the line that never slacked: shriekers, moaners, asthmatics, syphilitics, cripples, lepers. They dragged their feet across the sidewalk, they murmured to nobody. The parade of lunatics disgusted her. Rachel knew they couldn’t help what had seized them, and yet she half believed what people sometimes said, that these unfortunates were paying for something. She didn’t believe the quack about them being punished for crimes in a past life. No, something they did in this life had made every breath a hell on earth. She tried to close her eyes on them, but even in her own darkness she watched the parade shuffle by. Now my Louie joins their ranks.

She’d walk him home as he shivered, wrapped in blankets that dragged across the ground. He no longer tried to speak with his mouth — only with his eyes, and even they were exhausted. Just the two of them then, except for Edwin, who would come up and read Louie the newspaper. Rachel ordered him to read only the good news. This never took very long. After that, the three of them would sit for hours in the silence of Louie not being able to talk.

Finally a doctor at the Army-Navy Hospital told Rachel there was an operation he could try, a new procedure where you fixed one side and then the other, but the chances are fifty to one our old boy won’t make it. Of course, on the other side of the coin, the doctor said. An awful slow goodbye.

Then — and this is the part people back home insisted for years that even Louie Shlansky, Fargo Avenue’s greatest prevaricator, couldn’t have cooked up with a straight face — she left him there. Abandoned him in Hot Springs, right there at the Army-Navy Hospital. The legend goes further: the woman drove back to Chicago in Manny Epstein’s truck, alone.

The Como HotelCentral Avenue, Hot Springs, Arkansas

5/25/40

Dear Seymour,

I spoke with Dr. Klemme today and he said he was coming along as good as could be expected under the circumstances — but that he’s not “out of the woods just yet.” He’s doesn’t know if Daddy’s heart will able to stand this — only time will tell — that is the next 24 to 48 hours. He hasn’t woken up yet to see she’s not here. Of course you know that if he pulls through this he has to go through the same thing on the other side in two months. There is a man in the next bed who was operated on about ten days ago — but he’s only had one side done so far. He’s coming along fine, but he cries all the time because his nervous system is so upset. Of course there was another man who had the same operation about a week ago and he passed away the other night. He never came out of it at all. How are my two loves? Do they miss me? I miss them terribly. Make sure they make doody every day, and please be as much help to Mother as you can. I know she’s never easy, but do try. Well, my mind is quite a muddle. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. This being away from each other may help us — who knows? Because you know what we do, Seymour? I watch my father die and I know. We squander. Write to me care of the Como Hotel.

All my love, B

Bernice brought his body home on the Ann Rutledge. A train named after Abraham Lincoln’s girlfriend, a fact that would have sent her father into a convulsion of hosannas: You see, gentlemen, it was Mary Todd who poisoned Ann’s venison. This was in 1863. I was Assistant Secretary of War, and yes, I signed the confession. But hear this! Countrymen! Romans! Ukrainians! I did it because the President asked me to — for the good of the country — and his marriage. How would it have looked? Mary Todd dragged away in shackles? Abe would have rather boxed a thousand Stonewall Jacksons than half a Mary Todd. It was I, I, Louie the First of Fargo Avenue, Rogers Park, who also saved the union.

Her mother never explained herself, and after a while Bernice stopped asking. Seymour said it was simple, that there was no mystery, that grief just undid already-loosened screws. Why dwell on it, Bernice? Leave her be. Why must you always dwell? They gave her the tiny guest room in the house on Lunt. Olivia carried her meals up there and listened to her. Rachel never spoke of the past, only the present. She talked of the way the light looked outside her window and of the temperature, how the cold felt on her arms. For two decades she rarely went out in the street. Philip was afraid of her; Esther told her friends that Grandma Rachel smelled like a wet raccoon. One day, in 1956, she finished her soup and died.