Orrie’s Story
Thomas Berger
Contents
Part I
1
2
3
4
5
Part II
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
Part III
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
1
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4
To Brom Weber
PART I
1
The regulars at the Idle Hour Bar & Grill, beer drinkers except for Joe Becker, who preferred stronger stuff and could afford it, and Molly McShane, who always drank sherry wine, were either too old for the service, medically disqualified, or, as in the case of Molly and her pal Gladys, of the wrong sex.
Augie Mencken had parachuted into German-held France in the wee hours before the morning of D-Day, got a battlefield commission at the Bulge, and ended up in Berlin itself. His latest postcard was Scotch-taped to the mirror behind the bar, alongside several years’ worth of earlier cards, some now yellowing, and a newspaper photo of himself (though his back was to the camera) being handed a bottle of champagne by a pretty French girl as he liberated Paris in a Jeep.
That Augie had been the one to distinguish himself in the war was a surprise. He had not exactly been a success in civilian life, having failed as a businessman: his five-and-ten was a bust. He had been bailed out by his cousin, a guy nobody much liked (with the notable exception of Augie’s wife) but who had done well in his own career, shady though it was said to be. Whether E.G., as he liked to be called, had enjoyed the favors of Augie’s wife before his cousin went into the service was a matter of speculation by those at the Idle Hour, the males of whom thought Esther Mencken the sexiest-looking woman in town despite her age (late thirties) and her three children.
Of course if Molly and Gladys were present, the talk was suitably sanitized: in female company, the men were prudish, especially when the women were like relatives, Molly having always been plain and Glad an overweight widow in her fifties.
But everybody agreed that E.G. and Esther had been on intimate terms at least since Augie went to war.
Tonight, however, the ending of that war took precedence.
“Japs couldn’t take another bomb like that,” said Rickie Wicks.
Phil Paulsen, whose Regular Army brother had been listed as missing since the fall of Bataan and was thought likely to have perished in the Death March either from starvation or a more direct form of the notorious Nipponese cruelty to prisoners of war, was among the least bloodthirsty of the group. He now nodded soberly. “But what if Ralph’s a prisoner in a camp near one of those towns that got it?”
This was a dispiriting thought, but Joe Becker said, “Our side would know where the Americans were kept. They wouldn’t bomb our boys.” Joe was the oldest of the men and the most prosperous: what he said had weight.
Al Hagman was at twenty-five the picture of health when sitting oh a bar stool but had lost several of the toes on his left foot in an accident at the plant some years earlier. He now thrust his beer mug towards Paulsen. “Here’s to Ralph.”
Paulsen joined the others in drinking to that. “I still got my hopes. Mom believes he’ll turn up, God bless her.”
Hagman said, “Bill O’Hare got his at Anzio Beach, and Chuck Dunn got killed in the Battle of the Bulge.”
“My wife’s cousin, lived out West: he got it at Guadalcanal,” said Wicks. “And then Howard Vedder was in a German P.O.W. camp till it was liberated, and a lot of guys from around here were wounded. This locality paid a price.”
Bob Terwillen came in and stood beyond Joe Becker. He waved at the ladies, who sat as always at the short end of the bar, where it made a right angle and went to join the wall. Without being asked, Herm the owner and bartender brought him a bottle of beer and not a mug but a glass.
Terwillen drank some and then made his announcement. “Did you hear? Augie Mencken’s coming home tomorrow.”
Al Hagman chuckled. “Herm heard from him. We got a little party planned for lunchtime.”
Molly’s voice had a sarcastic edge. “War sure must have changed that guy. He wouldn’t let butter melt in his mouth when he was around here.”
Becker gave her a dirty look.
“Augie must be over forty if he’s a day,” said Terwillen, his eyes magnified by the thick lenses he wore. “And he’s got those kids. He wouldn’t have had to go into the service.”
“Forty-two last April,” Becker said.
“Probably had to lie about his age to get in,” said Rickie Wicks, who was himself young enough to have gone to war, but there was something wrong with his heart. Unlike Hagman, who walked with a limp, Rickie could show no external reason why he was Four-F, and since Pearl Harbor he had been fair game for the abuse of strangers as a draft-dodger and did not dare go into a bar where he was unknown. “You know those kids who make themselves older to get into the Marines? Augie was the opposite.”
Molly addressed Gladys, but spoke loudly enough to be heard by all. “I wonder what’s going to happen with Esther and E.G. now?”
“E.G. better watch out,” said Rickie. “Augie’s done his share of killing.”
Gladys was usually a listener, but now she spoke with obvious feeling. “She was the meanest little kid.”
“That’s right,” said Molly. “Your family was neighbors with Esther’s.”
“My sister always claimed it was her poisoned our dog,” said Gladys, “and while I don’t know I’d go as far as that…” At this point she took a strenuous draft of what might easily seem the same cigarette she had lighted on entering an hour before but was rather the latest in a continuous series.
2
Ellie Mencken was sixteen but so underdeveloped she could have been taken as three or four years younger. Her mother, who had herself at the same age been voluptuous long since, considered her more or less hopeless.
Esther poured her a glass of orange juice from a can the top lid of which had been pierced twice with an icepick, one hole for pouring, one for air: a technique of E.G.’s.
“Are you going to school looking like that?”
“This is a clean blouse,” said Ellie, glancing down at her flat chest through the bottom of her plastic-rimmed eyeglasses, one temple piece of which was cracked and wound with adhesive tape.
“How can you stand to keep wearing those, ugly specs? Every time he sees you, your Uncle Erie begs you to get new ones at his expense.”
Ellie set her pale lips. “They’re okay.”
“You’re old enough to start wondering how you’re going to survive in life, you know.” It was not the first time Esther had mentioned the matter. The orange juice was coming out too slowly into the little glass that had formerly held spread cheese. She shook the can. It was empty. Even with Orrie away at school, foodstuffs went quickly though at any given time the girl seemed to eat very little. “On your way home today, stop at Harriman’s and get juice for tomorrow and some baloney for supper. Bread, I guess. This toast is the last of it, and I had to scrape some mold from that. And see if there are enough eggs. And try to hold the bill down, will you?”
The allotment Augie sent home from the Army was miserably small, and significantly, it came by postal money order and not in a government check. It was obvious that he somehow finagled the authorities into giving him the money instead of se
nding it directly to his dependents, thus enabling him to siphon some off for himself or maybe for a German bitch: he would have to buy his women. Esther now understood that she had despised Augie ever since he demonstrated his moral weakness by agreeing to marry her immediately on being told she was pregnant at sixteen, not even asking whether the kid was his own. She had already had other partners, foremost among them his cousin E.G., then called simply Erle, who a year earlier had been the first to make a woman of her, but at this time Erle was elsewhere in the country, in one of those periods of his life in which he went questing for greater opportunities than were offered locally. He had obviously made a go of it, whenever and wherever, though he was not the sort to reveal much unasked, and fearing she might learn something that would only make her jealous, Esther was not the one to pry.
He might even have been married at some point. Certainly, with his appetites, he would have had to deal with other women: a state of affairs that was bearable only so long as it remained abstract, without details. All that really mattered was that throughout the years he took her to bed whenever he was in town, and from the late 1930s on, he was more or less permanently at hand. At first they were discreet, but with the passage of time and a common contempt for her husband, his cousin, grew less so. It was not unlikely that Augie was well aware of the situation even before he decided to go to war: maybe that was one of his reasons for joining the Army. It was characteristic of him not to say, though he was voluble enough about his other problems, which were exclusively those of money, or rather the lack thereof.
Why then did she not leave Augie for E.G.? For a decade and a half, the children were too young. Furthermore, Erle had never said a word on that subject, and, as always, she was too proud to ask.
“If I were you I’d go to Sue Anne and see what she can do with that hair of yours, at least,” Esther now said to her daughter, referring to the local beautician.
Ellie made no response to this. Instead she asked plaintively, “What I’d really like to do is stay home and wait for Daddy.”
“Well, you can’t,” said Esther, removing the milk bottle from the refrigerator. She pried off the cardboard disc and sniffed at the contents, which only just could be called still drinkable. “He’s not due at any particular time. He can’t make his mind up on what train, I guess. Isn’t that just like him? Uncle Erle would have been glad to pick him up. But no.”
“I wish I could have talked to him,” said Ellie.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” her mother said. “Think he’d name a specific time just for you?”
“Maybe he would.”
“You have an exaggerated sense of yourself. Drink your milk.”
Ellie shook her stubborn face. “It’s sour.”
“Then go without.” Esther strode from the kitchen. She had no patience with the girl.
An Augie back from the service would be an unbearable burden on all concerned. Ordinarily, over the years, Esther had not bothered to answer his boastful letters—leave it to him to succeed only when he left home and family behind—but when he announced he was about to be discharged, she responded quickly, begging him to make the Army a career. He had made a go of it thus far, hadn’t he, with the heroics and medals and promotions and all? Whereas what did civilian life have to offer? Would the postwar era be kinder to him than the pre-? She reminded him, as politely as she could, that he had no experience but that associated with the unfortunate five-and-dime. Why not stay in the Army and continue to prosper, maybe go on to become a general?
Augie paid as much attention to that appeal as he had listened to anything else she had said in all the foregoing years. But this time the laugh would be on him, and he would have only himself to blame. It was her idea, but E.G. agreed quickly enough, and anyway just thinking it up was the easy part. Making a plan of action that would allow for all the eventualities was much harder than the kind of thing you saw in the movies, which she only now realized were extremely sketchy about reality. Were it not for E.G., she might well have dropped the whole thing. He was much more practical than she: not only the means must be considered, but all that might result from each choice. A self-inflicted wound while cleaning a captured enemy firearm might rate high in plausibility but could they count on his coming home with a Luger?
E.G. said he had known returning soldiers reckless enough to bring along unexploded hand grenades. But how to detonate one of those without bringing down much of the house as well? There were obvious objections to nonmilitary means: hit-and-run by car (hard to set up without being seen by someone), murder by an armed robber (a crime unknown in their town), an assisted plunge down the cellar steps (might, with a healthy war hero, result only in some bruises), rat- or weed-killing poisons (even if undetected by the victim, how had they got into his food or drink?).
Esther became more savage as the quest proceeded. She now professed to be furious with herself for not doing away with him before he had gone off to war—and so saved Gena’s life.
“A kid her age, hitchhiking by herself on a highway.” E.G., next to her in the tourist-cabin bed, closed his eyes. He was not hearing this for the first time, but it had to be said. “She wouldn’t have run away if he hadn’t suddenly decided to join the Army. I couldn’t do anything with her whea she heard her Daddy had left. He always pulled the wool over those girls’ eyes. They thought the world of him, no matter what. Like it was me who had anything to do with him going bust with the store.”
Now E.G. showed anger. “Don’t remind me of that. You know where the money should have gone. My dad never forgave his.” The grandfather he and Augie had in common had been outrageously biased in favor of Augie’s old man and against E.G.’s own, leaving the latter almost nothing when he died but providing the funds for Augie’s father to open the five-and-ten at the edge of the business district. It had never done well during what was left of Theodore Mencken’s life, in later Depression days, but when bequeathed to Augie it lasted only another two years. Of course Augie complained that he had inherited more debts than assets, but to Esther, and E.G., the reason was simply Augie himself.
On Augie’s death the U.S. government would be obliged to pay the beneficiary of his G.I. insurance the sum of ten thousand dollars.
They finally settled on the plan only the night before Augie was scheduled to come home. He would die in the bathtub, by electrocution. An end-of-the-summer heat wave was in progress. It would not be unreasonable for an electric fan to be operated in the poorly ventilated bathroom with its one small window over the toilet, which furthermore could not be opened wide and still provide privacy. The fan might easily be dislodged from the rickety shelf high on the wall at one end of the tub and fall into the water below. On the other side of the wall was the master bedroom: a sudden blow against it, at the right spot, would do the job with dispatch and without incrimination.
“Ellie has got to be in the house,” said E.G. His chest was covered with ape hair. Augie’s was not nearly so hirsute, but, at least the last time she saw him, he had a full growth of hair on his head, whereas E.G. showed a long spear of skin where each temple joined the crown. Augie was taller, and actually better-looking in most particulars when taken superficially, but there was no authority in his weak chin and his brown eyes were soft as a dog’s.
E.G. pointed a finger at her: it was his ringed pinky. “The timing has got to be just right.”
“Okay, he’s in the tub. So I listen till the water stops running. I go in the bedroom then and hit the wall at the place where we measured and —”
“No, first, before all of that, you went to the bathroom and moved the fan to the front of the shelf.”
“That’s right.”
“And switched it on.”
“Okay,” Esther said, “I would have done those things…. So how long before I can go in and find the body?”
“Depends,” E.G. said, “if he makes any noise or not. I still say we ought to try it with a stray dog or cat, see if they make any nois
e. My guess is someone doesn’t when electrocuted. I think they’re paralyzed immediately.”
Esther had a special regard for animals: she could never have agreed to experimentation of that nature. “All right, so if he makes noise, I’ll go in right away. But if he doesn’t, as you think is probable, I’ll wait awhile.”
E.G. had lighted a cigarette from the pack on the table at his side of the bed and now blew a spurt of smoke at the ceiling. “I got to be someplace where I’ll have a good alibi just in case somebody might think I have a connection with this. So I’ll be at that bar where he always hung out. You know, the Idle Hour. When it’s all over you first call me there and ask for a Mr. Reynolds. The bartender won’t recognize your voice, will he?”
“I never set foot in that place,” said Esther, taking the cigarette from him and drawing on it.
“Then you call the ambulance. I’ll give them time to get there before I show up. Everything’s got to happen in the right order. If you call the ambulance first, there might be some reason why you can’t get through to me, maybe somebody’s tying up the line.” He pointed again. “When things go wrong it’s because accidents haven’t been allowed for.”
E.G. had had no education beyond high school, but he was naturally shrewd. In acumen he made up for what had been lacking in his father, who had been so outwitted by Augie’s dad. In the sons the situation had been reversed. While Augie was failing, his cousin had done very well. Precisely what he did remained mysterious to Esther, though she knew he had some real-estate interests among others. By contrast Augie on the slightest pretext would run off at the mouth on the subject of his own failure: he had softheartedly given too much credit; the wholesalers who distributed brand-name merchandise would deal only with the big chains, leaving the little guys like himself, in those days before Pearl Harbor, with made-in-Japan crap; the high-school kids whom he hired after school and on Saturdays were never of the caliber of those who set up pins in the bowling alley or caddied, he couldn’t say why, though it was obvious to Esther that the reason was he did not pay enough. But she would rather have cut out her tongue than say a word about his store unless asked, and of course never would he have done that. She was only a woman.