“You were talking about this girl of his.” Then in effect it was he who capitulated. “Come on, let’s not bicker.” He turned back to the window. “When are you going to tell him?”
“This is hardly the opportune time,” said Esther. She assumed a different voice, a witchlike falsetto. “‘Don’t be too upset, Orrie. He wasn’t really your father. It’s more complicated: it was your real dad who killed him!’”
E.G. spun around. “‘And your mother,’” said he, in an ugly voice of his own, “‘she cheated on him for twenty years and then she killed the poor son of a bitch in the bathtub…when he had just come back from fighting for his country. That’s the kind of mother you got!’”
In her fury Esther seized the nearest object that could serve as a makeshift weapon, the green glass vase from the drum table. It was almost always empty except on Mother’s Day, when in recent years, after Orrie was old enough to celebrate the occasion, he bought such flowers as he could afford, with the money he made cutting lawns and caddying.
E.G. dodged the missile, which shattered against the sill of the bay window. Then he strode to her and struck her in the jaw. She fell to one knee. He seized the front of her dress, bunching it up above the bosom. She tried to get her legs under her.
“You do anything like that again, and I swear I’ll kill you.” He slapped her face with his free hand, going and coming. As it happened, this hurt more than did the punch, which seemed to carry its own anesthetic with it. “Don’t you ever think you can do to me what you did to Augie.” He was not speaking narrowly of the murder. “You try to cut my balls off, I’ll cut your rotten throat.”
Being in an impossible situation at the moment, she submitted, sagging in his grasp. He let her go without warning. Her head might have struck the floor had she not caught herself on her hands.
His rage having been expended, E.G. was suddenly less severe, though scarcely tender. “Go put some ice on your face. You ran into a door while carrying that vase. That’s the kind of thing happens when a person’s got a lot of grief.”
6
Orrie was not old enough to be served alcohol in a public place, nor did he look anywhere near twenty-one. Paul could get away with it, given his size and authoritative manner. He could also buy a bottle of whiskey, which is what he had done now at Orrie’s request. They sat on their respective beds in the little tourist cabin, a mean place for such an exorbitant fee: two bucks. The bathroom was furnished with a stall shower and a toilet without a lid, and its door was not a door but rather a heavy curtain. Paul had suggested they stay instead at a decent hotel in the city, twenty miles away, but Orrie would not hear of spending even more on this mission, and when Paul amiably pointed out that he himself was uncomfortable and should be allowed to spend his own money, Orrie chided him for being there at all.
“It’s not your affair. Go back to school.”
Paul shook his head. “We’re friends.” He tilted the bottle and drank from its neck, then wiped the top with his palm and passed it across to Orrie.
The first couple of swallows had been hard to take, Orrie not having a history of drinking hard liquor. He did not even like beer. But after a few mouthfuls he was getting inured to it. Paul had offered to get something to mix it with and to try to find a place that sold ice, but Orrie’s pure and simple purpose being to get drunk as quickly as possible, there was no point in diluting the poison.
He felt the effects soon enough. His eyes were suddenly warm, and he was conscious of his tongue, wondering where he ordinarily kept it.
“Not bad.” He returned the bottle to Paul. “I don’t know much about whiskey.”
“This is bourbon,” said Paul. “It’s sweeter than Scotch. I figured you wouldn’t be a Scotch-drinker.”
“My dad used to hang out at a local bar a lot when I was a kid, but I don’t even know what he drank. Maybe I ought to go there and have one with his friends, in his memory. I guess they’d know what he liked. I ought to find out more about what he did in the Army, too. My mother never mentioned it unless we’d ask, and even then she wouldn’t say much.”
Paul drank more in each of his turns with the bottle than did Orrie, but as yet showed no sign he was affected by the alcohol. “I guess you’re old enough to be drafted, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Orrie answered. “But I got a perforated eardrum. I didn’t even know it till the physical. But now the war’s over and there doesn’t seem to be much sense in going to the service anyway.”
Paul gave the bottle to him. “I’m Four-F myself,” he said, blinking. “Isn’t that rich? I’ve always been the picture of health, all my life, been good at sports, never sick for a day. But it turns out I’ve got a heart murmur. Otherwise I would have joined the Marines. I’d a lot rather have done that than go to college.”
“You would?”
“Yeah.” Paul ran a hand through his hair. “Physical stuff. I’m better at that than books. I’m not stupid. I just can’t get much interested in reading, and you’ve got to do so much of it at whatever college you go to. I thought it might be easier when I transferred.”
“Listen,” Orrie said with comradely feeling. “I’ll help you out however I can. I really appreciate what you’re doing for me here.”
Paul accepted the bottle. “What am I doing? I just came along for the ride.” He was a genuinely modest guy. Orrie thought: God, if I were tall and wealthy, I’d be unbearable.
“It would have been tough to go through it all alone. My sister, she’s, well, she’s awfully young…” He was still not drunk enough to begin to share what Ellie had told him with regard to their father’s death. Paul might already be a good friend but he was still a new one. Being careful is not cowardice. Courage is not an exclusive possession of the rash. In fact, sometimes to move slowly and with care takes more guts than to rush in swinging wildly…or so he kept telling himself. What in hell did Ellie expect of him, to shoot Erie down in cold blood? He could not even bear to think of his mother in this context.
“She looks like she might be very smart in school,” Paul said, generous as always.
“Yeah,” Orrie said, drinking more whiskey. After he swallowed, by now a smooth procedure, he went on. “She could stand to do something about her appearance: she’s not bad-looking basically.”
Paul genially chided him. “You don’t mean get all painted up, I hope. That’s the kind of sister to have. A lot of these young girls nowadays get themselves up like streetwalkers, with flaming lipstick and tight sweaters.”
What he said had certainly been true of Gena—another subject Orrie had not mentioned. He had been quite a little kid when Gena, herself hardly twelve, had suddenly sprouted protuberances on her chest. At first this seemed like some kind of joke, and then when she persisted, it was embarrassing for him to be near her, especially when other people were also present. One day, by accident, passing the girls’ room, he saw through the half-open door that she was stuffing a balled bobby sock into one slack cup of a pink brassiere.
“I can’t stand girls who throw themselves at you,” Paul added.
So as to seem sophisticated, Orrie pretended to agree, but in reality he would have been ecstatic had an attractive girl made advances to him—he would have been mighty pleased had any of the girls at college so much as glanced at him before turning their heads. As yet he had been invisible, a state of affairs that was no improvement on that in high school, where though he could have dated any number of plain-to-fair-looking females, he could never establish more than a passing acquaintance with any of the series of girls he had adored from a distance.
“The man should be the one to make the first move,” Paul went on.
“That’s right,” Orrie said mechanically. He knew that sooner or later he had to face his real problem. Even though he had seemingly more courage now, with a bellyful of booze, than just after Ellie had exploded her bombshell and then left it to him to pick up the pieces, he was aware that nothing would be changed when he sob
ered up. The situation was no less hopeless: it was simply easier to accept being without hope when you were inebriated. You might even get drunk enough to revel in your hopelessness. He had never before quite understood the allure of decadence, he who had naively assumed there was satisfaction only in being upstanding. So you just accept yourself as a coward, and if the heat is too much to bear where you are, you run away to somewhere else and start over. Who’s going to follow you? God? The same God who permitted Erie to molest his sisters? To have power over Mother, the power of money? Erie owned the very house they lived in: chagrining but true. Orrie had enjoyed fantasies of making lots of cash in some quick fashion as soon as he finished college, buying the house and making a gift of it to his mother. That this vision was hard to relate to his vague intent to become an artist and suffer romantically for a while in legendary Bohemian style before being discovered by a wealthy collector with an exquisitely nubile daughter had not bothered him in the old days—that era which concluded with the death of his father the day before yesterday. But even that lamentable event had not changed things so much as had the meeting with Ellie.
God damn her. Why did she have to stick her nose in this mess in the first place? … An instant after the resentful thought had come and gone he did not believe he had summoned it up…. No, that was a lie: not only had he conceived it, he was proud of so doing: the little snot,, she’d better not try any of that crap on him again or she’d be sorry. Making a fool of him with such cock-and-bull junk! As if a flabby jerk like Erie could have overpowered his father somehow…unless of course he sneaked up and took him by surprise: which was more or less what Ellie claimed to have been the case. But before you got to the details, you had to believe Erie had the kind of character it took to murder somebody. He was a businessman, not a gangster, had probably never even got into a fistfight his life long. He wasn’t the type for violence. If he wanted someone murdered, he would undoubtedly have hired a lowlife of the kind he boasted of knowing.
Orrie could not remember a time when he thought Erie was anything but a phony. His mother always stuck up for the man, no doubt in the interests of family loyalty, though Erie was not her relative by blood, but Orrie had never, even as a little kid, felt the least respect for what was really only his second cousin. Maybe it would have been different had Erie been his real uncle. He had no uncles, and while he was supposed to have two aunts on his mother’s side, if he had ever seen them it was only when he was a baby, because it was about then that his mother’s sisters had both moved out of town and nobody had visited in either direction since. All his grandparents were dead. His older sister was missing, and now his father had died by either accident or…
“Ellie’s got a wild imagination. You know how young girls are. She’s got some crazy ideas about my father’s death. I told her to forget them, but I don’t know.”
“How crazy?”
Orrie tried to approach the matter. “She was there at the time, right down the hall. She says Erie maybe killed my dad. She says it might not have been an accident.”
Paul grimaced. “God.”
Orrie hastened to say, “She was pretty upset, but to go that far…I just hope she doesn’t go around town with a story like that.”
“It looks like she has, though,” Paul said.
“What?”
“Wasn’t that the police chief you were speaking to today?”
“He was a friend of my dad’s,” said Orrie, “expressing condolences.” But the whiskey impelled him to tell the truth. “Well, yeah, I guess she did say something to him. Isn’t that awful? She’s just going to embarrass everybody and get herself in trouble.”
Paul rubbed his chin with a ring-bearing knuckle. “She doesn’t look like a nut to me. Why would she say that sort of thing?”
Orrie needed another drink, but Paul had stopped exchanging the bottle, and he disliked asking for it. “She really hates Erie, you see. She’s got it in for him.”
Paul nodded. “She must have.”
“Huh?”
“If she’s more or less accusing him of murder. Isn’t that what’s involved here?”
Orrie laughed loudly but without mirth. “Yeah, that really makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?”
“I was making a joke,” Orrie said. “Why would Erie want to kill my dad—right there with my mother present?”
“They always got along?”
“Of course!” Orrie cried. “Erie helped my father out financially. My dad probably still owed him money.”
Paul leaned back on his outstretched arms and stared at the ceiling. “Maybe she is a little off her rocker.”
Orrie took quick offense, amazing himself. “There’s nothing wrong with Ellie!”
“I meant just a temporary thing, because of what happened. You said yourself—”
“Erie tried to get fresh with her,” Orrie said. “That’s why she hates him so much.”
“Oh,” said Paul, “you didn’t tell me that.”
“No. It wasn’t easy.”
“You mean he —”
“Yeah,” said Orrie, “but I don’t know the details.”
“He’s an old man,” Paul said. “He’s more than old enough to be her father. That’s disgusting. What’s she saying: that he murdered your dad because he was afraid she would tell him?”
“No, she doesn’t mean that, I’m sure.” He finally brought himself to ask for the bottle.
Paul handed it over, but warned, “You ought to go easy if you’re not used to drinking that much.”
Orrie was resentful. “I can take care of myself.” He slopped some whiskey into the glass but did not yet drink it. “I guess what she means is…” His voice trailed away.
Paul was thinking. “You don’t suppose Erie would want to get your father out of the way because of your mother?”
Orrie leaped up and threw the contents of the glass in Paul’s face, then raised his fists.
Paul wiped himself with the bedspread. He stayed seated. “You’re stinking drunk,” he said, “or I wouldn’t take that from you.”
“Come on,” Orrie said, brandishing his fists. “You son of a bitch.”
Paul rose and, brushing his friend aside with one hand, walked steadily to the bathroom, where he ran some water into one of the threadbare towels and cleansed his face. When he came back, Orrie was still standing in the combat position.
Paul put a hand on Orrie’s chest and toppled him onto his bed. “Sleep it off.”
Orrie shouted, “You can’t talk that way about my mother.”
“I didn’t say a word about your mother personally.”
Orrie was silent for a moment, and then he said, in as strident a voice as before, “You’re right. I apologize.”
“All right,” Paul said. “Now get some sleep.”
Orrie managed to get to a sitting position. “No,” he said. “I’ve got to sober up.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got to go home. I should have gone there in the first place, but I just didn’t have the guts.” He realized he was speaking too loudly and lowered the volume. He might be slurring his words somewhat, but he was thinking clearly. “Getting drunk really did help.”
“Can’t it wait till morning?” Paul’s shirt was all wet in front. He was looking at his watch. “It’s almost midnight.”
“I’ll drink a lot of coffee. I’ve got to go there now. That’s my place. Under the circumstances, I can’t invite you. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about the stupid thing I just did. You’re the best friend I ever had.”
“I’ll be here.”
“No,” said Orrie. “Go back to school tomorrow. You’ve already done more for me than anybody I’ve ever known outside my family.”
Paul shrugged. “Anything you need, just get on the phone and ask.”
Orrie stood up shakily. “I don’t know why you’re such a good friend to somebody you just met.”
Paul joked. “Neither do I.” But
then he said seriously, “This might surprise you, but I don’t hit it off with many people. It might not seem like you and I have a whole lot in common, but we just seem to hit it off. Maybe you’re the brother I never had.” He jerked his head. “Come on, let’s go find an all-night diner.”
7
Despite the blow from Erie’s fist, there was not much of a bruise on Esther’s face, and what little there was could mostly be concealed with makeup. Ellie had apparently noticed nothing when she got home from school.
Not only did the physical effect of the punch prove to be of little continuing significance, but the moral import too was less than crucial. Esther was able to survive it so easily because she had lost all respect for E.G. in the course of committing the murder. She blamed herself for allowing him to get under her skin with the imaginary remarks to Orrie. Her only vulnerability concerned the job she had done as parent to her male child. She had been a good mother, just ask the boy himself! But she could afford no more emotional outbursts. Control had to be maintained at all times in a world of enemies, to whose company E.G. now could be assigned. Coward that he was, he would surely capitulate under any suspicion whatever.
He had left before Ellie came home. Ellie’s manner was changed in the last couple of days. She had become silent, speaking only when questioned and then with the minimum. Could this be a result of Augie’s death? But the girl had not seen her father in four years. How much could he have meant to her?
Given the strain she was under, Esther found it even more difficult than usual to be alone with her daughter. She had bought ground sirloin for Orrie. When suppertime came without his appearance, she told Ellie to open a can of corned-beef hash and, having no appetite herself, went upstairs to Orrie’s room, where she sat down on the Indian-blanket bedspread, under the college pennants thumbtacked to the wall, and brooded over whether she should notify the police that he was overdue. If she did so, Orrie would be furious when he turned up. He had always hated what he saw as her tendency to meddle in his affairs. What she had tried to do, of course, was to compensate for a state of affairs in which, having two fathers, he had none.