Esther Stories (13 page)

In the morning it takes him a few panicked moments to figure out where he is. That cat glares at him from the floor. She’s made a nest out of Wallace’s coat. The room has no pictures. There is only this cat. Shirl’s knee digs into his thigh. Her mouth is open and her breath is loud and windy. When he gets out of bed, Shirl rolls over but doesn’t wake up. Philip parts the curtains and looks out the window as he buttons his shirt. It’s begun to snow. Tiny flecks pelt the window and turn to water, ride down the pane in streaks.

He watches Shirl and is shocked by the blurry memory that he’d reached for her in the night, in his stupor, and found her drawn away, huddled, wedged to the wall. He’d reached for her. He’d clawed across the sheets for her. It makes him think of his sister, who used to sneak into his room in the middle of the night and sleep under his bed. In the morning he’d wake up to a little hand reaching up, as if from the dead, twisting the skin of his arm. How he used to scream for his mother, and she’d stand in his room and say, “Esther only just adores you.” He looks at Shirl’s muddle of hair across the pillow. Clawed across the sheets for you. He leaves the coat to the cat.

In half an hour Shirl will wake up alone and dress and return to work, where she will type and file and endure Seymour’s gruff another day. Over lunch she will tell her girlfriend Irene from the accountant’s office down the hall about the honcho’s kid. Young, sort of fumbly, shadowed me down to Charlie Boo’s.

But Philip won’t show up for work today. He won’t go home to Lunt Avenue or to his mother, either. Instead, he will roam. Probably not beyond Peterson to the south, or Howard to the north, but for a while at least my father, in shirtsleeves, will roam the slush-brown sidewalks of this city he will never leave.

W
HATEVER HAPPENED
, it happened the night of April 20, 1960, the night Bunny Hirsch hosted an extravaganza to celebrate her husband Franklin’s two decades in business. The wow years, as he called them. He’d turned a storefront Ashland Avenue dry-goods shop into an empire that stretched the Midwest vertically.
Both Dakotas to Cairo, Illinois…People Trust Hirsch Drugs.
My grandmother claims it was the grandest hoopla ever thrown in a private house.
And the house!
One of those American-made castles on the lake side of Sheridan Road, the ones that make you slow down and gawk, amazed that anybody could be so ostentatious in such a cold climate. Theirs was a three-floor Italian palazzo with a tower, the roof of which was pink and looked like an upside-down sugar cone. “Garish,” my grandmother said. “Very
very
garish.” Both Illinois senators made appearances, along with a babbling cackle of congressmen. Sid Luckman, the old Jewish quarterback, the man everyone wanted their sons to grow up to be, sauntered in with his—
shhhhhhhhhhhh
—half-black fourth wife. Mayor Daley was there, drinking cranberry juice and rigorously cleaning his ears with his fingers. Suburbia always made him fidgety. My grandmother was so concerned about her hair for the party that she went back to the beauty shop twice to have her wave reset. (“Really, I was never so close to leaving Lamont in my life.”) That night the front hallway was decorated with irises and wild lilies imported, people said, from Baja, California, that morning. And there was Paula. Paula Hirsch had flown in from Colgate for the weekend. She was twenty. A startling redhead. Her hair was so unusually orange that people had often wondered who delivered this girl to Bunny and Franklin’s doorstep in a basket. Paula looked more like an Irish princess (“If there ever was such a thing,” my grandmother said) than the daughter of rumpled, floppy-breasted Franklin, a man who always stood crouched like the army boxer he’d once been. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination was he handsome. Bunny, of course, had been beautiful once, but according to my grandmother, she’d gotten considerably more severe and horsy-looking over the years. Yet their daughter, the ravishing anomaly, glided across the marble tile floors that night proud of her father’s money and her mother’s way with a party. Paula was not, and had never been known to be, a rebellious girl. Guests remembered her greeting them at the door that night as if she were her mother’s twin. She welcomed people with the same flutter.
Mrs. Katzenbaum! You could be his daughter! Come in, come in, both of you
…She danced, laughed, whispered gossip with the other college girls, including my Aunt Esther. She also drank, ate chocolates, and, as her mother had demanded, circulated.

The story goes roughly like this: At one point, not very late in the party, Paula Hirsch spilled punch on her dress. She’d been in the middle of a conversation with a man who was soon to become famous in the papers. An unknown, at least to Bunny’s set; it came out later that he hadn’t been invited. His name was Isaac Persky and he was the son of a pawnbroker on Garfield Avenue. His father still talked Yiddish. “How that boy got into that party,” my grandmother said, “God only knows.” Later that night, after they arrested him, Persky told police that after the spill Paula excused herself with a playful toss of her head (“How clumsy, be right back”). He said he gave way and watched her disappear into the kitchen, and that, Isaac Persky swore, was the last he saw of her.

“On Fargo Avenue,” my grandmother said. “I was Bernie
Shlansky
and she was Bunny Eisendrath. Bernie and Bunny. Her real name was Muriel, but her father called her Bunny because she never stopped moving, even in her sleep. The girl wore her favorite rubber boots to bed. We danced together at the Chicago Theater on the North Side, the Tivoli on the South Side, and McVicker’s in the middle. For two years, on school vacations, we traveled with Benny Meroff and his orchestra as part of his dancing girls. I never had a sister. My head on the El tracks for her would have been nothing. She was under the table when Benny Meroff himself stole a kiss from me—God knows why; I was the homely one, especially with my old nose. Anyway, Bunny tried to protect me, even though I didn’t want protection. I liked it. Benny Meroff’s slippery lips. But there she was, leaping up from under the table shouting
Fire! fire! fire!
like a banshee. She was there the night I pranced onstage at the Oriental without my tights. And she was a hell of a lot better showgirl than I was. Nobody shimmied like her. Could she have gone to New York? Absolutely. But who wanted that? We didn’t want to be discovered. We wanted to be wives in Chicago. (Of course, if anybody at the time had told me the truth about that pursuit…but that’s neither here nor there anymore.) We got married, had children, daughters. Her husband got richer than mine. God knows, you didn’t need to hire an accountant to figure that out. Man got rich as Croesus selling Kaopectate. But I had Esther, and Esther was Esther. Such a doll, nobody’d stop talking about her. A genius at everything she touched. Ballet, piano, violins, the balance beam, even school. Seymour taught her how to shoot, and she won prizes doing that. And Paula Hirsch was Paula Hirsch. Quieter than Esther (but who wasn’t?), much less the little bulldozer. When they were girls, Esther used to boss Paula around. Make her walk the dog while she sat on the grass in bare feet singing bathroom songs. Things like that. Girl so unlike her mother, and it drove Bunny daffy. Finally they sent her away to prep school near Boston. Bunny thought maybe Illinois was the problem. I hardly saw Paula in those years except when she came home for school vacations. But even then she was still so shy, hiding behind that strange red hair, following you with her eyes but not saying one word. I always had the feeling she was somewhere else when her mother was rattling on. You know, Bunny could talk a storm to sleep and not say a single thing worth remembering. I remember—not so long before—Paula had told her she decided to major in botany at college. God, did that have Bunny in hysterics. Her shouting, ‘My only daughter wants to be a florist!’ But at the party, that
party of parties,
she couldn’t have been more different, and Bunny beamed.
Look, Bernice, the girl’s escaped herself.
It was there in Bunny’s eyes as she kissed me and pulled me into the house that night.
Look at her! Look at my daughter!
And then, Lord knows, it happened.”

At around 11:30, a guest happened to be looking out a window in Franklin’s den at the back, dark part of the house. A snooper, my grandmother said, the kind who creeps around the dark outskirts of a party and takes inventory of your silver, checks the labels under your cushions. She was the wife of one of Franklin’s lawyers, and she was looking out the back windows trying to estimate how much land Franklin owned between the house and the lake. She noticed a shadow in the empty pool.

“The orchestra was playing ‘Londonderry Air’ and just like that they cut off. But even so, it got louder, so much louder after the band stopped.
So much much louder.
”

She was naked when they found her. This fact led to great speculation in the Chicago papers, involving, as a matter of course, the hired help of the caterer (especially two black waiters whose pictures were run in the
Trib
) and the pawnbroker’s son, the infamous party-crasher, who, it was said, might have been driven wretched and murderous by the sight of what he could never have. (What the black waiters might have wanted with Paula Hirsch, nobody would say out loud.) It was also reported that Paula’s third-floor bedroom window was open, her fingerprints on the window handle. Her dress was neatly folded on the bed. Water and baking soda had been rubbed into the stain. The only thing askew in the room was a lamp found smashed on the rug.

“Nobody ever had much of a clue. Such a soft-spoken girl. But did she have friends? A busload of them came from out East for the funeral. I’m telling you, a busload crying their eyes out.”

Bunny Hirsch put her faith in the overturned lamp. “My daughter,” she announced from behind a black veil to the friends gathered at the house after the funeral, “was attacked and pushed out her own window. No one will ever be safe in their own homes again.” After the investigation dragged on for months, not a shred of new evidence was found. People started to say out loud what they hadn’t had the courage to say before: that Paula Hirsch had knocked the lamp over herself when she climbed up on the sill. But still the questioning continued. (“They drove Persky’s father out of business with all that suspicion,” my grandmother huffed. “And the blacks, God only knows what hell it was for them.”) Then people began to murmur that Franklin Hirsch had paid off the police in order to appease his now insane wife.

“All that red hair, but so so timid. Once, early on, her mother sent her away to camp to get her to talk more. A theater camp of some kind up in Michigan, near Charlevoix. Two weeks later the camp director wrote and told Bunny her daughter had a brilliant career ahead of her as a mime.” My grandmother laughed. “It was a routine letter; I used to get things like it all the time for Esther.
Esther has a brilliant career ahead of her in tennis, Esther has a brilliant career ahead of her as a water-skier, a chef, a yeoman archer.
Bunny and I drove up to Michigan to rescue Paula that afternoon.
My daughter isn’t going to be anybody’s freak show.
And Paula, as if she had a premonition we were coming, had on all that white makeup when we stuffed her in the car—she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten then. Bunny was so furious she couldn’t speak. But Paula and I did. We sat in the back together and laughed as I wiped her face with Kleenex that Bunny kept tossing back to us like plucked flowers.”

She stops on the narrow stairwell and listens to the trumpet, shoulders the wall in the dark, lingers to the slow murmur. The horn eases. She goes up again.

They were having tea on the patio. Bunny’s chair faced away from the swimming pool. It was three months after Paula’s death, July 1960. My grandmother had spent every morning with Bunny since the catastrophe, long after other friends went back to their lives and started whispering about how even in mourning Bunny Hirsch was a prima donna. But my grandmother remained her loyal lieutenant. My grandmother patted her head and stroked her neck and held her, absorbed Bunny’s tears and her fury. For hours on end out there, she listened, stroked. But that morning my grandmother said something else. She told me she couldn’t say exactly why she did it. But wasn’t she grieving also? Wasn’t Paula a daughter to her, too?

“We can’t know them, really, even our own flesh. Even our own daughters, Bun.”

Bunny Hirsch stood up and dropped her cup on the bricks—simply opened her hand and let it fall. She stood there with her fingers spread wide and faced the pool. Then she stalked into the house. A few moments later, while my grandmother was still kneeling and picking up the shards, the new maid came out and said Mrs. Hirsch was lying down and no longer felt well enough to entertain guests.
Guest?
She’d known Bunny five hundred years. They’d both started at Miss Rucker’s when they were six years old. How many numbers had they done together? The Piccadilly, Honor of Lady Elgin, the New
Georgia
Serenade, Iroquois Fire Dance, the Pica Pica, Sailor’s Hornpipe.

The palazzo has long been sold off, remodeled, subdivided into apartments. The trim’s been repainted an even brighter pink than it was in Franklin’s time. There’s a circular driveway now. The pool’s been filled in. It’s impossible to know it was there unless you know to look for the contours in the grass. A large sunken rectangle close to the house.

Earlier it had rained. She reaches out the window and rubs her hands on the outside of the pane, pulls them back inside. She rubs her face with the grimy water, her neck, her breasts, her stomach. Nothing now but sweet dizziness.

We are at our usual posts, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. My grandmother cuts coupons from a stack of old newspapers. She’s wearing reading glasses so that the tip of her nose pokes out like a small bulb. She is tough. She still teaches a dance and exercise class for seniors, and anyone else who can keep up, on Wednesday and Friday afternoons at the rec center uptown. This is how I always think of her. Strong, but also tired. Not that far off from the way she looks in the old dance pictures, slinky and lovely, wrapped in a feather boa, wearing ruffled bloomers, one beautiful foot raised above her head. Because in those pictures there’s a tiredness that doesn’t match her scanty-clad showgirl poses. Her eyes look as if she’s fighting to close them—as if she already knows, as if she’s a mother with a lost daughter already.

“So Bunny never—”

“Never.”

“She just denied it? The entire time?”

“More than denial. Listen, Leo, there’s no mystery. That woman would rather her daughter had been violated and mutilated by a nutcase. She couldn’t tolerate a single thing out in the world that reflected badly on her. Especially the truth that she was a vile mother who drove that girl to the grave. Why else would Paula have done it like that? In front of all those people?” My grandmother pauses, snips a coupon. “
And
she was jealous.”

“Of who?”

“Who do you think? Of me—for Esther.”

“We’re not talking about Aunt Esther.”

“Always. We’re always talking about Esther.”

“But Paula—”

“Bunny Hirsch was spared.”

“This was a girl who dove out a window and nobody had any idea why. You said it yourself to Bunny on the patio.”

“I watched my precious—tubes out her nose on a bed.” My grandmother rises. The scissors clatter to the table. “That woman never even sent a card.”