Orrie's Story (12 page)

“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 sobered 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.”

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.

They had been close when he was very young, but as adolescence proceeded, Orrie thrust his mother ever farther from him. That this might well be normal—as E.G. insisted, though here the source should be considered, for the boy had consistently, at whatever age, rejected
him
—made it no easier to accept. With Gena gone, Esther saw herself as fundamentally alone, despite the association with E.G. that finally extended to a partnership in murder. He was not flesh of her flesh. To be without strong blood-connections at her age, a woman was utterly defenseless.

The room still smelled faintly of Orrie, who as a child always exuded a natural bouquet and did not lose it even as an adolescent. Never had she detected the smell of sweat on him, as with Augie, or E.G.'s often strong breath. Her son was the most attractive male she had ever known.

After a while she lay back on the bed. It was serene here, in the growing twilight, between the silhouette of the desk he had acquired, with his own saved-up money, at a used-furniture store and the bookcase he had made from scratch in manual-training class, the titles of the volumes on the shelves thereof too dim to distinguish now, but she could remember many, having started him on the childhood classics at an early age,
Tanglewood Tales
and
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
, with romantic illustrations of long-haired ladies and men in gleaming chain mail. They shared a love for stories about heroic animals like Balto the Noble Sled Dog who got the serum to Nome and Buck in
Call of the Wild
. There was a summer when Albert Payson Terhune, teller of true-dog tales, was the exclusive source of all Orrie's reading. Yet she had never got him a pet of his own.

Orrie was the sort of child to whom such things could be explained. When Esther was a kid her mother had no extra money to spend on a pet, but the girl adored the fox terrier that belonged to the next-door neighbors, which love was requited by Sparky, who spent most of his free time, in those leashless, fenceless days of yore, in her yard. To other people in the neighborhood, however, the animal was a pestilence, lifting his leg on prized zinnias, shitting on footpaths, barking at sunrise, and finally someone fed him poisoned food. He came to Esther to die in horrible convulsions. Never again could she expose herself to the risk of such agony. As to cats, she was as indifferent to them as they to her, and when nine-year-old Ellie came home once with a stray kitten found on a riverbank at the school picnic, it was Augie who had supported his daughter's cause, saying surely the creature had escaped from the bag in which, with the rest of an unwanted litter, it was supposed to be drowned. Such a will to life must be celebrated! All right, but it was up to Ellie to care for it. Which presumably the girl was still doing, for these many years later, the black-and-white feline could be seen now and again slinking about the yard. Esther had at least banned it from the house.

Like her, Orrie was cold to cats. He shared most of her tastes until, beginning to feel his oats as a growing man, he had believed it necessary to oppose his mother. Nevertheless, underneath it all, he cherished her. He had to. He came from her, and now she had no one else.

Though assuming she had stayed awake throughout her reveries, Esther must have drifted off at some point, for when next she became aware of the room the window had disappeared, taking with it all else that had been visible by its failing light.