Esther Stories

Michigan City, Indiana

A WHITE-BORDERED black-and-white photograph of my grandfather and my father looking out at Lake Michigan. The picture was taken in Michigan City, Indiana, in the late 1940s. My grandfather and my father are visible from behind. There is no mistaking the shape of my grandfather. He is 5'7'', bold, forward, and squat. The muscles in his shoulders are bunched up so that his neck and his shoulders meet as one, like the gentle slope at the bottom of a mountain. He is pointing at the lake. With his other hand he is holding my father’s hand. My father is wearing a fedora that is too big for his head.

My grandfather is telling my father about the lake, about how many miles it is from north to south, east to west, about how ferocious it can be, about the ships it has swallowed. He is telling my father about the towns with Indian names along the Michigan and Wisconsin coasts. Muskegon, Manistee, Sheboygan, Mantiwoc. A place called Fort Michilimackinac, where the British vanquished the French in 1761. My father says nothing. When my grandfather was gone in the war, my father used to draw pictures of him riding on his ship. Pictures with crayon captions like YOU KILLER JAPS BEWARE MY DAD!!! But now that my grandfather has returned, my father is afraid of him, of his shouting confidence, of the attacking way he handles his fork at the dinner table. And my father knows that the war didn’t make my grandfather this way. He remembers it was this way before, too. He’d hoped with all his pictures and all his praying that the war would either change his father or kill him. Neither has happened. And he is ten years old and looking out into the glare of the summer lake, and although my grandfather’s voice is soft and playful, the hand that holds my father’s is a wrench that slowly tightens around his aching fingers. The boy stares out at the vast and tries to see what his father sees.

The Raft

MY GRANDFATHER, who lost his short-term memory sometime during the first Eisenhower administration, calls me into his study because he wants to tell me the story he’s never told anybody before, again. My grandmother, from her perch at her dressing table, with the oval mirror circled by little bulbs I used to love to unscrew, shouts, “Oh, for God’s sake, Seymour. We’re meeting the Dewoskins at Twin Orchard at seven-thirty. Must you go back to the South Pacific?”

My grandfather slams the door and motions me to the chair in front of his desk. I’ll be thirteen in two weeks. “There’s something I want to tell you, son,” he says. “Something I’ve never told anybody. You think you’re ready? You think you’ve got the gumption?”

“I think so.”

“Think so?”

“I know so, sir. I know I’ve got the gumption.”

He sits down at his desk and stabs open an envelope with a gleaming letter opener in the shape of a miniature gold sword. “So you want to know?”

“Very much.”

“Well then, stand up, sailor.” My grandfather’s study is carpeted with white shag. It feels woolly against my bare feet. I twist my toes in it. In the room there are also many cactuses. My grandfather often encourages me to touch their prickers to demonstrate how tough an old bird a plant can be. My grandfather captained a destroyer during World War II.

“It was late,” he says. “There was a knock on my stateroom door. I leaped up. In those days I slept in uniform — shoes, too.” My grandfather smiles. His face is so perfectly round that his smile looks like a gash in a basketball. I smile back.

“Don’t smile,” he says. “Just because I’m smiling, don’t assume I couldn’t kill you right now. Know that about a man.”

“Oh, Seymour, my God,” my grandmother says through the door. “Anyway, isn’t he supposed to be at camp? Call his mother.”

He looks at me and roars at the door, “Another word out of you, ensign, and I’ll have you thrown in the brig, and you won’t see Beanie Dewoskin till V-J Day.”

“I’ll make coffee,” my grandmother says.

“It was late,” I say. “There was a knock.”

“Two knocks,” he says. “And by the time he raised his knuckle for the third, I’d opened the door. ‘A message from the watch, sir. A boat, sir, three miles due north. Very small, sir. Could be an enemy boat, sir; then again, it might not be. Hard to tell, sir.’ I told the boy to can it. Some messengers don’t know when to take a breath and let you think. They think if you aren’t saying anything, you want to hear more, which is never true. Remember that. I went up to the bridge. ‘Wait,’ I told them. ‘Wait till we can see it. And ready the torpedoes,’ I told them, or something like that, I forget the lingo.”

“The torpedoes?” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “The torpedoes. I couldn’t make it out, but the chance that it wasn’t a hostile boat was slim. You see what I’m driving at?”

“I do, sir.”

“No, you don’t, sailor.”

“No, I don’t,” I say. “Don’t at all.”

“We’d been warned in a communiqué from the admiral to be on high alert for kamikaze flotillas. Do you have any idea what a kamikaze flotilla is?”

“Basically,” I say, “it hits the side of your boat, and whango.”

“You being smart with me? You think this isn’t life and death we’re talking about here?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“So I waited. It took about a half hour on auxiliary power for us to get within a quarter mile of the thing — then I could see it with the search.”

My grandfather pauses, opens his right-hand desk drawer, where he keeps a safety-locked pistol and a stack of pornographic comic books. They are strange books. In the cartoons men with long penises with hats on the ends of them and hair growing up the sides, so that to me they look like pickles, chase women with their skirts raised over their heads and tattoos on their asses that say things like Uncle Sam’s my daddy and I never kissed a Kaiser. He whacks the drawer shut and brings his hands together in front of his face, moves his thumbs around as if he’s getting ready either to pray or to thumb-wrestle. “Japs,” he says. “Naked Japs on a raft. A raftload of naked Jap sailors. Today the bleedyhearts would probably call them refugees, but back then we didn’t call them anything but Japs. Looked like they’d been floating for days. They turned their backs to the light, so all we could see were their backsides, skin and bone fighting it out and the bone winning hands down.”

I step back. I want to sit down, but I don’t. He stands and leans over his desk, examines my face. Then he points at the door, murmurs, “Bernice doesn’t know.” On a phone-message pad he scrawls, BLEW IT UP in capital letters. Whispers, “I gave the order.” He comes around the desk and motions to his closet. “We can talk in there,” he says, and I follow him into his warren of suits. My grandfather long ago moved all his clothes out of my grandmother’s packed-to-the-gills closets. He leaves the light off. In the crack of sun beneath the door I can see my grandfather’s shoes and white socks. He’s wearing shorts. He’d been practicing his putting in the driveway.

“At ease, sailor,” he says, and I kneel down amid the suits and dangling ties and belts. And I see now that it’s not how many times you hear a story but where you hear it that matters. I’ve heard this before, but this is the first time I’ve been in a closet alone with my grandfather.

“Why?” I say. “Why, if you knew it wasn’t—”

“Why?” he says, not as if he’s repeating my question but as if he really doesn’t know. He sighs. Then, still whispering even though we’re in the closet, he says, “Some men would lie to you. They’d say it’s war. I won’t lie to you. It had zero to do with war and everything to do with the uniform I was wearing. Because my job was to make decisions. Besides, what the hell would I have done with a boatload of naked Japanese? There was a war on.”

“But you just said—”

“Listen, my job. Just because men like me made the world safe for men like your father to be cowards doesn’t mean you won’t ever blow up any civilians. Because you will. I do it once a week at the bank.” He places a stumpy, powerful hand on my shoulder. “Comprende?”

“Never,” I breathe. “Good,” he says, and we are standing in the dark and looking at each other, and the story is the same and different — like last time, except this time his tears come so fast they’re like lather. He blows his nose into his hand. I reach and offer him the sleeve of one of his suit jackets. “I’ll let myself out,” he says, and leaves me in the confessional, closing the door behind him.

I don’t imagine anything, not even a hand that feels like a fish yanking my ankle. Another door opens. “Seymour? Seymour?” my grandmother says. “Where’s the kid?”

The House on Lunt Avenue

IT IS EARLY Monday morning on Lunt Avenue, Rogers Park, Chicago. November 1954. Seymour Burman shouts at his son Philip, the boy who will become my father. It is ten before seven and Seymour’s anger smells of Scotch. Philip is eighteen and has flunked out of the University of Illinois. He lies on his old bed with a pillow over his face. The room stinks of filthy socks. Seymour paces the sliver of room not taken up by the bed. The floor creaks beneath the frayed carpet, which was once green but is now the stagnant brown of the puddles that lie near the sewers along Lunt Avenue waiting to be frozen by December. Philip lifts the pillow from his face and yawns.

“And tomorrow?” Seymour lifts a big cordovan leather shoe and stamps it for emphasis. It doesn’t resound. This house. In a part of his brain not currently outraged by his slothful son, he decides, once and for all, the time has come to buy a place in the north suburbs.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” Philip says.

“You’re a miserable lazy.”

Philip props himself against the headboard. “Tomorrow. For Christ sake, I said tomorrow.”

“You think it’s all free? Is that what?”

“What?”

Seymour flaps his arms. “This! This!”

Philip rolls his eyes and looks out the window. Even on this rare, bright November morning, the sunlight hardly creeps into the room because the house next door is so close, a proximity that used to be this room’s single consolation. Millie Finkle’s bedroom window is no more than ten feet away. Millie was in the class ahead of him at Sullivan and mostly ignored him. There were nights, though, when he caught her figure against the light, behind the pulled shade. But Millie is gone now, an Alpha Something Phi at Wisconsin, and already engaged to a darling handsome boy studying law at Northwestern. This information courtesy of Mrs. Finkle, whispering in his mother’s ear at the market. So now the possibility across the way is back to being a window, and Philip is home again, a disgrace to the family.

“This is unacceptable!” Seymour booms.

“Give it a rest.”

“You think I joke. I’ll call a locksmith.” He bolts from the room, pounds down the stairs — for a stocky man, he moves fast — and grabs his fur hat off the front hall table. The house shakes after the slam of the front door, then is calm. Philip shuts his eyes and in a moment is nearly asleep, thinking not of Millie but of where she lives now. Soft bodies in an enormous foggy bathroom. White cream on faces, scurrying legs.

In pajama bottoms and no shirt, Philip wanders the house. His little sister, Esther, must be at school. His mother is probably teaching dance. The house stands, silent and empty, except for his grandmother, who never leaves the guest room anyway. He stops by the door and listens to her cranky breathing. She’s awake. Grandma Rachel breathes like that, as if she’s asleep, even when she’s not, even while she sits and stares at nothing. She’ll never die. He doesn’t knock.

There’s a note from his mother on the kitchen table. (Four dollars is enclosed.) “Two roast beef sandwiches in the fridge. In wax paper, behind the tomato juice. Have a wonderful day! Ignore the Admiral. He’s just letting out hot air. If he doesn’t exhale, he’ll explode all over. He does love you. By the way, they’re hiring at Goldy’s, so you might be able to get your old job back. Hint. Hint. Kisses.”

Bernice stands before the mirror in the ballet studio above Al Fonroy’s Shirts and Slacks on Touhy Avenue. Sweat pours down her neck and chest, soaking the front of her leotard. Her mind is on nothing but her flexibility and the power of her own legs. She stretches in the mirrors, which double her image to infinity. There’s nothing else in the world but this movement. Even at this small-time level. Yes, yes, there was a time when bigger was possible. Before Seymour, the children, and the war. This Seymour can’t take away. The great Lincoln Kirstein himself watched her dance in a Ruth Page production of Frankie and Johnny. And after the show — she remembers this often — while the Russian girls were tittering a mile a minute, he approached her without introduction (his huge forehead gleaming) and said, simply, “Why not come to New York? I’ve started a school.” And she almost went. Even now visions of dancing “Morning, Noon, and Night” at the Capitol Theatre invade her dreams. She extends her arms, slides, runs a step, a grand fouetté right, then half-turns. Pauses, opens her legs wide, turns into a slow leap, and muffs a tour jeté. Lands, turns, slides, slides, shuffles left, and is about to leap again—

“Bernice?”

“Yes.”

“Your son’s here.”

She grips the bar and raises her leg slowly. In the mirror she examines the thin wrinkles that are now etched below her eyes like tiny veins in a marble pillar.

Philip will learn. She knows this. He’ll catch on. He’ll go to work. They always do. And thank God. They couldn’t possibly not work. What would we do with them if they didn’t? But this doesn’t mean the need won’t go on. Her men. Esther has never had this. Always an independent young thing. Esther, who used to love getting lost in the vast shoe section of Marshall Field’s, who would try on big men’s shoes and waddle around and quack at anyone who’d listen to her. Her daughter still thinks this life’s not a defeat. But the men have always been different. Even Seymour, for all his bluster, couldn’t find the ears in his head if she wasn’t around to tell him where they were. And no matter how far they stray, they always return, guilty smiles spread across their mouths, begging for forgiveness, eyes to the floor. Seymour came back from the war terrified of his own children. Esther’s crying in the night used to send him over the edge of the bed. Man overboard! They should have sent women. Women wouldn’t have come back sentimental. Drop the bomb and be done with it. And Philip’s the same. He’ll pull himself together. But like his father, there’s something missing in him. Warmth, some courage, even love surface in both of them from time to time. Still, something’s not there. She slides again, leaps, and tries another tour jeté, this one a little better. She knows the moment she lands, so easy. You don’t even need talent. Only a little grace. The room begins to fill with other dancers. Bernice mops her neck with a towel.

“Tell him I’m teaching. Tell him my purse is on the bench in the backroom.”

Tuesday morning, and the tweed coat doesn’t fit and smells of Pall Malls. Philip Burman looks like a kid playing dress-up. The coat is left over from his high-school days, and it didn’t fit well even then. A hand-me-down from his Uncle Wallace. Wallace was ten years younger than Seymour, closer in age to his nephew than to his brother. The story goes that he laughed a lot — out loud — deep belly laughs that made the rest of the family nervous. The other legend is that it wasn’t just a heart attack that dropped Wallace dead at thirty-eight, but also the stormy intensity of my grandfather to excel, to expand, to go public. Wallace was famous for failing. He didn’t pay attention to unpaid balances. He neglected details, forgot appointments, always ran late. He sired only daughters.

On the El, Philip tugs his sleeves in an attempt to stretch the coat’s arms. The knot under his chin is excruciatingly tight, but he knows if he loosens his tie his father will notice right away. Today he will suffer it. The other people on the subway stare straight ahead or out the window at the tar-paper roofs of stores and the back porches of rambling tenements. Their bundled shoulders jolt with every lurch of the train.

At the office Philip examines claims. He makes check marks. His job is to search for inconsistencies. In the numbers, in the descriptions of the accidents, in the words of his father, which liar did what to the other liar? He shuffles his feet under his table. The office is cold, and he bounces his legs to keep his feet warm. The place is so silent that the flap of the turning of papers gets on his nerves. Washing out the fat drawer at Goldy’s beat this. Fred and Myron yammering about the price of hog whatevers and beans.

The one bright spot is his father’s secretary. Her name is Shirl. Not Shirley. She’s already corrected him twice. “Only my mother calls me Shirley and she lives in Toledo.” She’s got on a thin print dress that is too short and summery for the weather. She’s got plump cheeks and sighs a lot.

Behind Shirl, beyond the closed office door, Seymour sits at his desk, a paperweight gripped in his hand. Just before lunch he often daydreams about the war. Today, in a starchy uniform and creased leather-brimmed hat, he struts the bridge. The captain. Of all the guys on the ship, there’s only one guy who’s captain. He thinks about shaking Jackie Cooper’s hand at Nouméa, New Caledonia. How many men can say they held Jackie Cooper’s sweaty palm in theirs?

Seymour’s lackey, a very tall, timid, small-eyed man named Roger Craigson, has the office to the right of his boss. Craigson’s door is open. It’s Craigson who gives Philip work. He approaches Philip’s little table, blinking profusely, forcing a smile.

“Howz it?”

“I guess all right. I found some inconsistent things.”

“Excellent. Let’s have a look at your effort.” Much is not said. Craigson is wary of the boss’s kid. Craigson had a wife once, but she ran, and now he wears this humiliation in the smile that juts out both edges of his mouth like twin scars. He’s prepared for any kind of insult — he’s endured them all — and he looks at Philip and waits for him to say something snide. But Philip says nothing, just points to what he’s found and waits for Craigson to leave so he can stare more at Shirl’s breasts, which project from her chest like the prows of attacking ships. She types like a banshee. The letters whack the paper as if she’s punching a bag.

Seymour’s door bangs open. “I’ll be at the Berghoff,” he says. Shirl nods and looks curiously at Philip, who — she’d noticed — looked down immediately at the sight of his father.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” Philip says. “Outside the office.” The bartender clinks glasses, hums a silent song to himself. He’s shrivel-faced and small, so tiny only his head bobs above the bar, like a begging child. He looks at my father and sucks his cheeks. The place is called the Charlie Boo’s: nothing more than a cramped narrow room, hardly more than the bar itself, some stools and green and brown bottles in front of a mirror. A jukebox is jammed against the far wall. There’s one guy at the end who looks as if he’s counting his fingers, over and over.

It is Thursday evening, four blocks from the office. Philip has followed Shirl.

“Look. I don’t want to be harsh, but you’re a kid. Not only are you a kid, but you’re the honcho’s kid.”

“I just wanted to talk to you. Without Craigson’s eyes.”

Shirl sighs and glances at herself in the mirror, nudges her hair. “Don’t think about him. He’s a dopey. Worry about the honcho.” She looks at the door. “Look, anyway, I’m waiting for somebody.”

Philip, his hands in his lap, rubs his thumbs together. “I’ll wait with you until your friend comes,” he says.

“Uy yuy yuy,” she says, warming to him. She orders two beers from the little bartender.

The bartender looks doubtfully at Philip and winks at Shirl.

“The kid trailed me.”

“You want me to take him by the ear?”

“I’m twenty-five,” Philip says, and puts a ten-dollar bill on the table.

“I’m Adlai Stevenson,” the bartender says, and places two glasses before them.

“Thank you, Boo Bear,” Shirl says. She has a slight double chin, a second layer of skin softly rounds and dips below her jaw. She turns to Philip. “So you flunked out of school and now you’re working for Daddy.”

“Not for long.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Something else.”

“Does the big guy know?”

“Screw him,” Philip says. “It doesn’t matter. I’m getting my own place. And a different job. So—” Shirl laughs and leans into the bar, tips over a glass with her elbow. A foamy stream nearly flows over the bar, but Philip blocks it with his sleeve before it has a chance to drop and spill all over her dress.

Shirl rattles the bar. Says, “What about a little whiskey for the babe in the woods?”

She lives on the third floor of a walk-up on North Pratt. They get off the El and walk along streets lined with dirty plowed snow that looks like piled ash. Now bundled in Wallace’s beer-stained coat, Shirl marches ahead. Philip follows in shirtsleeves, quietly shivering, fearful of saying the wrong thing and being sent home. It is after midnight and they’ve been drinking for hours. Across the street from Shirl’s building is a construction site, a large pit ringed by earth-moving machines that look to Philip like giant sleeping dinosaurs. Shirl flings open the lobby door. He watches her bare red ankles as she tromps up the stairs.

Shirl unlocks her door and leads him into a black hall. She turns on the light. “This is where I live,” she says. He blinks, and through the purple light in his eyes he sees a green couch and a metal card table. She flicks the light off. “You saw it. There it was.” She leads him, clackety-clacking, through a dark room to a bed twice the size of the one in his own room. She pushes him onto to it, kisses him, then rolls over and pulls her dress over her head. He places his hands on Shirl’s coarse bra and shuts his eyes. The bed twirls. Shirl unbuttons his shirt, kisses him again, and bites his lip with a pointy incisor. He grabs her shoulders and squeezes. His feet begin to thaw.

“I have a cat,” she says.

Philip murmurs that he hates cats.

“You won’t hate Theresa. Nobody hates Theresa.” Her movements are quicker now, more abrupt, as though she wants to settle whatever this night’s going to turn into before she is too exhausted to move anymore. She yanks his shoes off and throws them across the room. She unzips his pants, pulls the cuffs, and slides them off. Scrunches next to him. “Okay,” she says, and licks his ear. “Let’s get this circus under way.”

“You smell like peaches,” he whispers.

“Nice. That’s nice,” Shirl says, and pulls him toward her. Then she scuttles atop him and jams her breasts into his chest. He squirms. There’s some wet back-and-forthing, but other than that, he feels nothing but the somersault of the room. Shirl’s legs wiggle. She laughs and flounces.

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.

Daughters

WHATEVER 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.”

My Father in an Elevator with Anita Fanska, August 1976

HOT DAY. Anita Fanska. Sleeveless dress and hair wrapped up, intricately woven. Her head leaning forward looks like an attacking wicker picnic basket — and she wants him — and he most certainly wants her. Her sigh is more a moan. They’ve got eighteen floors to go. He says, The Fiskjohn matter, and she says, Yes, the Fiskjohn matter. My father’s voice changes, gets lower. He thinks it sounds like thunder. He rumbles. The letter with the changes has to go out by tomorrow noon at the absolute latest. He hopes reminding her that he’s the boss might make a difference to Anita Fanska. It doesn’t, and he knows it. Authority isn’t something she yields to — doesn’t matter that for the past seven years she’s been somebody’s secretary (my father’s for about a year now), and that earlier she was a Catholic schoolgirl taunting nuns. Even then people said Anita Fanska took what she wanted, which was zero from anybody, including the supposed Almighty, as she often reminded the Sisters. She wants my father not because he’s the boss and can make things simple for her, which is the reason he wants her to want him, but because he’s balding and not sure of himself, and ruddy-faced, and some days he’s handsome, and once he ran for the state legislature and got trounced but came into work the next day and said, breathed, Well, that’s over—he didn’t cry about it. He went back to work. She cried. Anita Fanska cried for two days; she wanted my father to be governor. She takes a step toward him, crowds him. He watches the floor numbers tick down.

Anita yanks out the stop button and sets off the alarm. She pulls off her heels, drops, and sits on her shins with her bare feet facing up behind her. As if they’re on the beach and not in an elevator in the Mercantile Exchange Building on South Wacker. My father won’t sit down. He stands above her, as if literally lording over her will make her stop lording over him in the only way that matters.

Mr. Burman—

The Fiskjohn matter.

Mr. Burman—

He loves her, which is his real problem, though admitting it to himself would take more than even Anita Fanska can muster right now. You come to love in so many ways — the routes zigzag and always turn into lies when you try to retrace them. It’s what Anita likes best about love, the way it twists you, boggles you, and she’s pretty certain it’s here with this angry little man who won’t sit down and join her, but who also lacks the courage to push in the button and stop the alarm. Because what he wants — submission — is so far away from what she wants, this sentimental girl who’s fallen so hard for her boss. She wants to love him in this elevator amid the jangling alarm that sounds like chains being dragged, while custodians scramble and the security guards babble nonsense into their walkie-talkies.

Any people in it?

Moron, you think a rat pulled the alarm?

It’s a chance at love and chances don’t come around so often, and she pats the floor as if all he needs is a little coaxing.

Philip—

But my father stands on the edge of a beautiful abyss and dreams of power. He watches her sweat-glazed arms and doesn’t move, does nothing, which is why the aftermath, the long office August days, will be so much easier for her — because she sat down in that elevator and simply said, Philip, and nothing else.

Seymour

SEYMOUR BURMAN dreams he’s General Grant writing his memoirs while racing throat cancer. Dreams he is sitting in a wicker chair on a porch at Mount McGregor, New York, a writing board on his lap. Dreams of glorious reams of paper at his feet and of pain in his esophagus so incredible that it feels as if someone is forcing him to swallow acid, the acid like a liquid blade slicing, and yet still he writes, still he remembers, still it all comes back to him in a throb of valiant memories — until everything shoves to a halt like a marching army suddenly stopped and falling backward over itself. It’s time for Shiloh. Shiloh, Shiloh. Little church called Shiloh. How do you write about Shiloh? How do you say you were in a clean-sheeted bed in Savannah, a steamship ride away from your men at Pittsburgh Landing, when the rages of hell poured forth? How do you say 41,000 rebel soldiers — who you knew were only twenty miles away — took you by surprise? How do you say you heard the thunder of the guns during your breakfast and that you finished that breakfast? Your reputation to be riddled like the uniform of another mother’s son from Ohio, and still you chewed on?

Sy Burman asleep with Grant’s Personal Memoirs riding his chest, snoring in his chair in the den on Pine Point Drive. It’s a Sunday in July 1979. The book rises and falls. My grandfather’s hand aches from gripping a pen in his dreams. Grant will never use his voice to speak again. Only these paper words. Seymour, who fought his own war, loves the little bearded hog butcher hero who won the bloodiest war of all, and now he inhabits the veined, shrunken hand that will not confess the debacle of Shiloh. That will avoid it, shunt it, spend what little eloquence is left on less haunted glory. There is nothing like the oblivion that coats memories we refuse to remember. My grandfather shivers with Grant, a blanket pulled up to his chin, a wool cap on his head.

The Moraine on the Lake

THE MORAINE HOTEL. Highland Park, Illinois. The wedding was absolutely splendid. The bride radiant, unworldly. Guests could look at her for only so long. Whoever saw a dress so white? The way you might shield your eyes should you be so lucky to make it to any place like heaven. Here it was. The Moraine on the Lake. It’s long gone. They knocked it down in the seventies. It was a sprawling white hotel with five sets of colonnades. To proud Midwestern eyes that had never seen one, it looked like a Southern plantation transplanted to our rocky bluffs. All that remains now are the towering oaks and the ravine that used to border the back, lakeside of the hotel, an enormous moat of dead leaves. Esther’s wedding at the Moraine Hotel was splendid. Even now, that’s the word people use, and it’s funny that knowing what happened later can never spoil this vision of perfection. Now the pictures of it are stuffed away. But they pale. They look staged, like black-and-white movie stills. The only way to see Esther Burman’s wedding is to reconjure it. Every once in a while the idea of it, that it happened, leaks, and people who were there are struck by the memory of her. Of course the groom was perfectly irrelevant, which makes people remember him only fondly, if they remember him at all. It was Esther. Every inch of her was glory.

Her mother, Bernice, is fussing in the hall. Esther is standing in the bedroom of the presidential suite. She is wearing a slip and waiting. Her back is to the lake that fills the window. The lake is calm, almost sullen; the waves limp and whiteless. She sees it anyway. She thinks of how even the meekest wave yanks the gravel back and forth, up the shore and back. She kisses her shoulder, not out of narcissism but out of self-preservation. She fears the splendor and the praise. The praise. She already knows to beware of it, to hate it, though her mother eats it, compliment after compliment, like her favorite Fannie May nonpareils, chocolate on one side, beady candy on the other. Bernice, she glows. She positively glows. At the rehearsal, one chuckler waved a half-eaten shrimp in Esther’s face and gabbed: “They can see you from space. The Russians are watching you right now. You could make peace. You could melt even those cold fishes. Send Esther to fight the Reds! Send Esther!”

It could be a chant: Send Esther! Send Esther!

She kisses her shoulder to tell herself, Hold on, wait. Her mouth telling her body not to worry, that this will last only so long. That everything — she already knows this — lasts only so long.

Now she stands with her hands at her sides. Later she will wear long white gloves, something that will occur to her years after as the most ridiculous thing about the entire day. She won’t turn around, only stares at the door and waits. It makes her woozy, the lake. She won’t look at it. She will never look at it. She waits for her mother, who in a moment will bustle in and merrily gasp, “Angel, but you’re not dressed!” Her hands full of a veil that will make Esther think of a heap of white lettuce.

Esther Stories

THE FACES of the pallbearers are always the same. Gallant and not trying to seem proud, but at the same time not unproud. That’s the fine balance, and when we hoist, it’s not our muscles but our sorrow lifting, our sorrow straining. My father lifts his sister. There are five other pairs of hands lifting, but mostly it’s him, and he doesn’t imagine her last moments, or any other moments before her last ones. He’s concentrating on his lifting, not saying goodbye, lifting, not recriminating, lifting. He has a job to do, and he’s like everybody else. His hands are no different.

I used to prance around my grandparents’ house on Pine Point Drive in my Uncle Lloyd’s pointy, flimsy army cap, though by that time Lloyd was already persona non grata in my family. Whenever my grandmother saw me in that hat, which I’d found in a dresser drawer in my father’s old room, she’d wince and bite the inside of her cheek and say, “Take that off, Leo. I beg you.”

One theory, a romantic one, is that things started to go wrong, horribly wrong, with my Aunt Esther after she was forced to break it off with Bo, a gentile, the only man she’d ever loved. (This last nameless Bo is always described as a gentile even though his not being Jewish was never an issue: the issue was that he had no prospects and he wasn’t going to college.) I’m not certain how my grandparents actually prevented my aunt from running off, but I assume (membership in this family for thirty-five years gives me at least this right) that they deployed a tried-and-true Burman tactic: psychological guerrilla warfare. Potshots from the hills under the cover of darkness. I can hear my grandmother muttering under her breath:…My opinion of course doesn’t mean a lick…only your happiness…never has…a mother’s burden to suffer this…children do what they wish…And of course in drops Lloyd Kantorowitz to the rescue! Some son of a friend of Mattie Rosenthaler’s. Handsome, modest, tall, ex-lieutenant, medical student. A faintly mustached man with long eyelashes and squinting, tentative eyes, all three characteristics bothering my grandfather so much that in later years he often growled that he knew Lloyd was a zero from one look at his mug.

I study an old high school picture of Esther and find it difficult to believe that the portly, angry, hollow-eyed woman who lived in my grandparents’ basement throughout the 1980s is this person who looks so much like Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: seductive, sweaty, a little nasty, a little pouty. In this black-and-white photograph in the gold frame I found tucked away in my grandfather’s study, in a cabinet under his shelf of Civil War books, is someone I would have loved had I been there.

Not a surprise that at her funeral there were men like me to spare. Lonely grovelers who had known her back when. When she was Homecoming Queen of New Trier High School, when a single glance in your direction from Esther Burman in the slamming-locker halls was like being plucked from the masses by a long-fingered, just-widowed princess. Calling for you. Choosing you. And you pointing at your throat, confused and flushed, knowing she was making a mistake that would cut deep for years. A guy behind you or next to you, but never you. And her (the glance longer now, burning into your memory): Yes, you.

So she married Lloyd Kantorowitz in 1963, and Bo became a Burman family footnote. I first hear of all this from Olivia Hodges, my grandparents’ housekeeper of forty-five years, a woman I loved as much as my mother, a woman who used to sing out family secrets as willingly as she’d serve grilled peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches to my friends and me after school.

One day Olivia told me this: His name was Bo, but he didn’t look anything like that stupid name. A short boy with crazy dirty hair. No taller than your father and very polite. Politer than your father ever was or is. From here but not from here here. (She made circles with her hand to let me know that he wasn’t from near the lake, that he probably grew up on the other side of the expressway. West.) Esther said he played guitars or drums or some other nonsense. He cleaned up at your grandpapa’s bank, and no way in God’s emerald heaven was your nana going to let Esther end up with a man who pulled wastebaskets and swamped toilets for a living. Esther didn’t take ballet and piano and those posture lessons from Cootie Thomas downtown so she could marry a janitor. Use your common sense, Leo. Esther was a jewel. I used to pin her hair every night. She wouldn’t let anybody else touch it. She wouldn’t even go to Lamont’s with your nana. But did she eat that boy up! Talked about him night and day. Dreamed about him. Woke up in the morning, and it was Bo jumped out of a plane, Bo got elected president. Lloyd was polite, but so shy. Not like Bo, who used to come around to the kitchen window and make faces at me, wiggling his mouth trying to reach his nose with his tongue. Then out of the clear blue sky she told him not to come around the house anymore, and she went down to Illinois for college. Lloyd, when he came in the picture, would look at his shoes when he talked to me, and I’m the maid and he’s the doctor. But handsome. Not a hair of a nose difference between Lloyd and Rock Hudson in the face except that Lloyd was going to be a doctor and your nana liked that better.

You can’t blame Lloyd for falling in love with Esther. Who wouldn’t have? Who didn’t? He was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. A Jew from some little town in Wisconsin nobody in my family could ever pronounce correctly. You think he ever saw a girl like Esther Burman before? She was a freshman at the University of Illinois and still grieving over her sent-away Bo, when my grandmother, her best friend, Mattie Rosenthaler, and Mattie Rosenthaler’s friend (always unnamed, as though everyone refuses, out of principle, to remember this last link to Lloyd) conspired to introduce her to the young doctor-to-be on the Friday after Thanksgiving, 1962. Esther was a sorority girl, already treasurer of the chapter and only a first-semester freshman. (A girl dropped out and Esther leaped from pledge to officer.) Lloyd was in his third year of medical school at Northwestern. They met at a cocktail party in the house on Pine Point, in the living room. The big room with the matching black leather chairs and the long windows and the shaggy brown rug that I used to run my fingers through and pretend was the thick fur of a dead bear my grandfather shot. Petrified Lloyd made Esther laugh when he fumbled and then stepped backward on his wineglass. Together they knelt and bumped heads, Lloyd in the heat of his fifteenth apology. Then my grandmother and her friends descended upon the broken glass like crazy pecking pigeons. Clucking: It’s not your fault, Lloyd. Olivia keeps forgetting to dry off the stems. Olivia! Help us here! It’s not your fault, Lloyd!

The next Saturday Lloyd drove down to Champaign with a back seat piled high with violets and yellow roses and boxes of Fannie May chocolates. It became a regular date. Lloyd’s Saturday-afternoon drive down south. After driving three and a half hours without stopping, Lloyd would sprint up to the palatial oak door, each time as jittery as the first day he met her. Then he’d be ushered inside the forbidden palace, that nation-state of women. The front hall of that sorority house was every bit as grave as any European church he’d studied in high school. Flying buttresses. Vaulted basilicas. Carpets as thick and soft as a putting green. Curtains closed tight against the street like a funeral home. The house mother, fat and stubby, an elegant noose of pearls around her neck, standing behind the little embroidered couch in the waiting room, arms folded across her tremendous chest repeating, “We have rules in this house, Mr. Kantorowitz. Hard-and-fast rules concerning curfew.” Waving her chubby arms, nose crunched up as if she’s whiffing something putrid. “Get acquainted with these rules lest you find yourself permanently unwelcome at Sigma Delta Tau.” And then Esther would appear, a flutter of hair and unbuttoned buttons, the back of her dress floating behind her like a puffed sail, circling the couch, kissing Mrs. Roachwell, gushing, “Please don’t scare Lloyd, Mother. Can’t you see he’s scarable?”

I shake hands with Lloyd after Esther’s funeral service. He sucks his lower lip. He still has that smudge of mustache. He is still handsome. “Difficult day,” he says. His hand is moist and sticky, and he holds mine too long, trying to make up for the cowardice of his words. I nod, and both of us turn away to shake more hands. Later, I watch him as he stands alone. His second wife, also a doctor, stands nearby and talks to an elderly cousin of my grandmother’s, a woman in a jeweled hat named Simone. (Apparently she is French, but nobody has ever been able to explain why she’s related to us.) Lloyd’s new wife has heard only horror stories about Esther, but this is a funeral and she murmurs to Simone in a reverential hush. Cousin Simone yawns. She’s never liked my grandmother or her children, and this whole ordeal is starting to bore her. Lloyd stands close to the edge of the conversation, but he’s alone. Alone as the aged high school boys who will go home to their lipsticked wives and sigh, Rosalie, I still can’t get myself to believe that Esther Burman could die. I watch Lloyd watch the spot at the front of the room where the casket lay before the men from Pritzger’s loaded it into the hearse for the ride to the cemetery. Later, Lloyd and I will bump elbows as pallbearers when we help move Esther from the car to the grave. But now I watch him squint at the spot. His head quivers slightly. If she was gone before, where is she now?

If it is true what my grandmother says — that our boxes of family pictures lie like her cousin Ubby, the harness racetrack owner from Pittsburgh — then you should be able to tell they are frauds just by looking at them. But you can’t. And who is to say, without the interference of hindsight, that Esther and Lloyd’s early marriage wasn’t a happy one? Esther moved back to Chicago from Champaign and into Lloyd’s apartment on 1 East Schiller on the North Side. Years in my family are often identified by streets: Lunt Avenue, Rogers Park. Pine Point Drive, the first house in the suburbs. In the 1 East Schiller photographs—1963 through 1965—Lloyd and Esther are attached, tangled, cheek to cheek. Their grins are smelted together to form one happy gaping mouth. (My grandfather likes to take close-ups of his subjects’ faces. Backgrounds have never interested him.) To me, the smiles aren’t haunting. They’re beautiful, naive smiles that have no way of knowing what’s to come. They make me love them. The them they were in 1963 and the them they became. Maybe it’s because the pictures are only of their faces. No rooms. No houses. No familiar trees to link them to their longer story. Esther’s compact little face and Lloyd’s awkward tilt toward her. He was so much taller. Two smiling, bobbing apple—​colored blushing cheeks.

I cannot — as my grandmother does — scoff. I refuse to see only the bitterness of later. I should have known. We should have known. Seymour said he didn’t like something he saw, but who ever took what he said for a grain of anything. But just because I know genuine joy when I see it photographed doesn’t mean I can’t see, even at this early stage, what Esther’s trying to do with her eyes. In every picture from that period Esther is looking straight at the camera, smiling with Lloyd but also entreating her father, my grandfather, the ubiquitous cameraman, to see her. I say that was the problem in those years. She let people look but not see her. Her parents, her parents’ friends, her sorority sisters, her husband. Except for those moments — caught on film and now stored in a box in the basement — when she can be seen begging her father to put the camera down and look at her and just say, Esther.

Not a letter opener she attacked him with but a butter knife — a blunt, rounded, harmless knife for slicing butter is what my grandmother says. Olivia insists it was a letter opener. Take your pick. What matters is Esther chasing Lloyd around the apartment screaming and finally cornering him in the shower stall. Pushing, digging the blade — whichever blade — into his shoulder as he crouched. Ripping his shirt and then his flesh. Lloyd not fighting her because he never, even then, refused her touch.

Oh! I tell you! Olivia shouted. Nothing was bigger in that house than when Esther was expecting and the celebrating was going on. Mattie Rosenthaler, and all your nana’s other friends, too, brought over enormous boxes of presents from Field’s, and your nana couldn’t stop rubbing her hands. What could be better to cure what people called Esther’s restlessness than a baby? Everybody shopped and shopped, and Esther glowed like a little pink peach, like she did in high school when she won Homecoming Queen and rode the float through town. All of us smiling in front of your grandpapa’s bank, and we waved and she waved. When she was pregnant she’d take the train out from the city and rub her belly, and I remember her saying, Ollie, do you believe it? Can you believe I’m the swelly-belly girl! And I cried and said, Esther, I love you, honey. You’ve got to take care of yourself now. Because even then, even though that girl was happier than she ever was, she was starting to doubt things. She’d say things like Lloyd doesn’t love me and he never has. Course I knew that wasn’t the problem ever. Oh, did I know that wasn’t it! Lloyd loved her like you’ve never seen. She didn’t want to be her. Makes no sense in a girl so beautiful, but it’s true. So beautiful that people used to stop the carriage when she was a baby. We’d be walking along and people would shout and point and say, Would you look at that angel. An angel on earth. But when she got older Esther used to stand in front of the mirror and stare and stare at herself as if she could change what she’d been given just by looking.

My parents were out of town, so we were sleeping at my grandparents’. I must have been eight or nine, my brother around four. It was late and I was tiptoeing across the cold tile of the big kitchen on my way to Olivia’s room, and the cats. I liked to sleep with Olivia, my face in a soft cat belly, my feet rubbing Olivia’s tough bony ankles. I had almost made it to Olivia’s door when someone sniffed. I turned and looked. It was Esther. It must have been sometime in 1968, because she had no stomach anymore. When I tried to sneak by, she stopped me. I looked at her again and, in the weak light of the driveway lamp, saw that she was wearing only a towel.

“Leo?”

“Uh-huh.”

She was eating cold spaghetti. She put her fork in the bowl. “I want to tell you something your mother’s not going to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“And I want you not to forget.”

“I won’t.”

“You’re going to sleep with Olivia?”

“Just to say hi to the cats.”

“If I tell you something, will you remember it?”

“Okay.”

Even in that low light I could see that her eyes were red and she was more beautiful than my mother.

“I’m going to be honest with you.”

“Okay.”

“You pay.” She stared at me. “You pay for everything. When you think you’re getting something for free — remember this — you’ll pay for it later.” She put her bowl down on the counter and came closer, knelt down. Her breath was hot. The driveway light was in her hair. “Please don’t forget this, and don’t let anybody, especially a pretty Miss Muffet, tell you I lied to you.” Then she held my arms for about a minute before she laughed a little and said, “You can laugh in this house. Even when Olivia’s not around to make jokes. You are allowed to laugh.”

My younger brother, Alex, remembers little about Esther. But he thought about it for a while and then said, “I spent one day with her in my entire life. I must have been six or something. Mom brought us downtown because you had to go to the doctor’s or the barber. For some reason she dropped me off at Esther’s apartment. Uncle Lloyd wasn’t home. It was a Saturday. She took me to the Shedd Aquarium to see the electric eels. Then we went to a park. Grant probably. She chased me around. We played horses. She got down on her knees and neighed. She let me climb a tree also. I remember that. And she didn’t tell me to be careful. She just let me climb. Then she took me to Granny Goodfox on Wells Street and bought me a felt puppet, a cow. In the car on the way home, Mom named it ‘Bossy.’ I remember you kept swinging it around by its ear out the window until Mom told you to cut it out.”

Her baby was born dead on February 10, 1968. They named her Frances after some great-grandmother of Lloyd’s and buried her at the Burman plot in Memorial Park in Skokie. For the first six months after it happened, my grandmother slept on a cot at Esther and Lloyd’s apartment. Either that or Esther stayed at Pine Point. My grandmother told me many years later that at first Lloyd resisted, but later tolerated her presence, because at least when she was around Esther stopped her terrible moaning. In that same conversation I asked, Did Esther really want to be a mother? I mean, given everything you know now, do you think she would have been able to handle it? We were sitting at her kitchen table. This was last year. My grandmother glared, but not at me, somewhere off to her left, as if somebody else, not me, had spoken. Then she said, “What kind of question is that? Don’t get so big, Mr. Toots, that you stop being able to understand that that baby would have rescued everybody.”

The house on Pine Point Drive was a dirty-yellow-bricked rectangular colonial covered by scraggly vines, as though the house was trying to camouflage itself behind the trees in the front yard. In the back yard was an old swing set, rusted out, one swing cracked in half, the other missing, its two chains dangling. There was also an old wooden boat — even then overgrown by weeds — that was the one thing my grandfather brought north from the old house on Lunt Avenue. The boat was our favorite, and I’d always race my brother to it. We’d start at the garage, run through the garden (with Olivia shouting about her cabbages), and if Alex didn’t trip me, I’d win.

True, her beauty made it easier for everybody, because nobody really had to look at her. It created the distance that nobody even knew existed until much later. But in my family there was also a little boy who grew up to be my father. While everyone else may have loved Esther’s beauty without looking into her eyes, my father saw someone else. The Esther she wanted my grandfather to see from behind his camera. And he hated her. Olivia says it’s because he thought his head was too round and he was too short and because he was older and because nobody ever repeated his name, called him angel, nothing. My father saw only the flawed, scared, restless Esther. The tantrum Esther. The Esther who used to go into fits as late as her sixteenth birthday. Ranting on the kitchen floor, screaming about her hair, and throwing her shoes at Olivia.

What it was between them I’ll never know. I have two brothers, two sisters myself. One of my brothers must have been the dumbest hoodlum in Chicago for five, ten years running. Little Davey Jr. We all called him Dodge. I didn’t speak to him the last year of his life. I might see him again, depending, and if I do, you can bet I’ll call him a horse’s ass to his face, even as I’m kissing it. But Esther and your dad had something else. Like they weren’t ever related. He was, what? Four years older? Since she was little he used to go after her. When your papa was away at the war, it was just your nana, me, and the kids. Your nana loved that girl so much, sometimes she forgot she had a son. Your dad used to follow me around. Yanking my dress. And when he wasn’t pulling on me, he was tugging Esther’s hair like he was plucking weeds, and calling her a liar about everything. That never stopped. Even after she got married — even after he found your mom and was married himself — he still said Esther was a selfish fool. Then he went after Lloyd. Both your papa and your dad thought Lloyd wasn’t good enough for this family because he couldn’t talk as fast as they could. The more your nana went on about his face his nose his cheeks, his being a doctor, the more those two complained about him. But who they were really talking about was Esther.

This one always gets told with a grin, no matter who the teller. How one night Lloyd drove Esther eighteen miles out of Champaign, to a little town called Rantoul. The Rantoul story. How they cuddled up on a mowed-down cornfield with a bottle of wine and a blanket to see how many stars they could count. Lloyd kept a tally on a dollar. But Lloyd forgot to fill up the car after his drive downstate and they ran out of gas coming home at 10:45. Curfew was 11:00. They walked the eight miles back. Mrs. Roachwell standing at the door at half past midnight. Howling: Banned. Banned! Banned for life, Lloyd Kantorowitz!

After the service my grandmother weeps softly into her palm in the front row, grabbing and reeling in with her free hand anyone fearless enough to go near her murmuring grief, her shivering.

My father says now, even now, that he helped put her in the paddy wagon that brought her to the locked psychiatric unit at Rush St. Luke’s out of family duty and love. They brought a white-and-blue-striped Chicago police paddy wagon, and my father, in lieu of her nowhere-to-be-found, soon-to-be-ex husband, helped put her in it out of family duty, out of love, he says. He rips open a sugar packet with his teeth. I know you’d never believe that I did it out of kindness, and I did not. Out of love, because she was my sister and nobody else gave a damn. That worthless Lloyd. You think he cared for a minute what happened to her? After she attacked him with the scissors he knew he had a way out. And then, when he finally did leave, all that screeching and pounding Esther started doing on the apartment walls.

Nana says it was a butter knife.

Listening to my mother. No wonder.

And Olivia said the neighbor’s baby was bothering her, that it kept crying in its sleep.

A baby, bless Olivia’s heart! An old faggot lived next door, Leo! I knew him, a judge, lived into his nineties still chasing young clerks around his chambers. There wasn’t a baby for miles of that apartment. Don’t you get it? What choice did I have? Let her keep at it? You think I wanted to admit — even to myself — that we had a lunatic in the family? Your grandmother wanted nothing more than to let it all go on. She said that neighbor probably was bothering her. She said, What could Esther do but bang on the walls if management wouldn’t listen to her? Don’t you see what I’m up against with these people? But your mother has trained you so well to see me as the enemy in every situation that you can’t, won’t — so easy to judge me now. What could be easier than to judge me now?

Your sister.

My sister, yes.

Lloyd and that dirty little mustache, my grandmother says. Running off with a nurse. Mortifying is what it was. Facts have never been very important to her. Lloyd ran off with another doctor. But wasn’t the leap into another set of warm arms inevitable, a survival instinct? Doesn’t matter to anybody except my grandmother what job she had. A nurse, a little nurse, how obvious. If it makes her rest easier, let her be a nurse. The point is that Lloyd’s leaving gave my grandmother somewhere to put the blame. For all of it. The divorce and the hospitalization. For her, the two went hand in hand.

“Oh, for God’s sake, the man is an adulterer!” my grandmother roared into the phone one afternoon. I must have been fourteen. Olivia and I were watching baseball. She said of course Nana was talking to Mattie Rosenthaler. “A tiff. Little more than a tiff,” Nana was saying. “A husband and wife do that a thousand times a day in this state. And that’s grounds? While he runs off with the Red Cross, the court says her nicking him is grounds?” Olivia shaking her head and clapping for the do-nothing Cubs.

Olivia’s hair has always been white (even in the oldest pictures). The story about her that got whispered is that once she ran away from the family to marry a man. She went to Gary, Indiana, because her husband worked in the steel mills. This was after my father was born but before Esther. She came back after exactly a year. My grandmother said she never said a word about the man, not even his name, but my brother and I used to make up stories about him. We called him Gary from Gary, and said he had arms as long as the antennas on the top of the John Hancock Building.

The week after Olivia came back from being married, Dr. Zaballow slapped my grandmother on the behind and told her she was pregnant again.

Always white except when she wore one of her black wigs, which she did when she bartended my grandmother’s cocktail parties. I can see her laughing at Lloyd and his slippery fingers and even dumber feet. Thanksgiving, 1962. Stooping to clean up the glass and then pouring him another wine. Patting his round shoulders and saying, Doctor, can’t you prescribe something for my aching back? Forty-eight years old and already my aching back. Lloyd gulping and coughing: I’m certainly not a physician yet.

Watching, jealous already, my father stands in the corner of the room near the bar and talks to one of my grandfather’s friends about his future plans. He’s finally finished college, but is still adrift. He seethes over Lloyd because Lloyd is tall and, though a klutz, is already someone.

She tried to kill him.

She didn’t try to kill him. Even you can’t say that with a straight face.

She stabbed him. There was blood. Doesn’t matter whether she used a Bic pen or a machete. The standard for involuntary civil commitment is dangerousness. Do you want me to fax you a copy of the statute?

But they didn’t take her away until six months later. Up till then Lloyd was still living there. He lived there after, Dad. If he was so scared—

She was in hysterics. Even the old judge called my office and pleaded that I do something. Her attacking his walls all night. The man said it sounded like a riot next door. And Lloyd barely lived there after. In name alone. Since when are you so technical? She never denied attacking him. Anyway, you’re missing the whole point. She stopped eating, wouldn’t answer the phone. The woman needed help. Why do you refuse to see that? I’m to blame for what went on in that apartment? The same as your grandmother. You never look to the source. Take a look at Esther. Take a look at her life. Take a look at what she cared about from the day she was born.

“You can’t get all crazy over the little things now that you’re toting a baby,” Olivia told her. “Because then the baby’ll be born with nerves like yours and then we’ll all be in for it.” And Esther laughed and said, “Ollie, don’t talk that way. The kid’ll hear you. He’s got ears in his feet.”

In a box in the basement of my grandparents’ new house, the flat ranchhouse we haven’t even bothered to christen with the name of its address, I root out another picture. This one of my father in a sailor suit. Esther in a red dress between his knees. My grandfather has taken a few steps back (the kids probably waved him away), so it’s one of those rare photographs where there is a background. You can see the sides and the pointy bow of the rowboat. The trees in the yard of the Lunt Avenue house. They’re sitting in the stern; my father holds his hand like a little roof over his eyes, as though captaining the boat through violent sun. His other hand is clasped around his sister’s waist. You can see the tips of his fingers. Esther’s eyes are closed, but her cheeks are raised in delight.

The bike accident story gets tossed around. I first heard it from my mother, who wasn’t born a Burman (and like Lloyd had the sense to get out) but knows much of the lore, because a long time ago — no longer, God knows, no longer, she says — she was intrigued by the family antics. So she asked questions. She said that the way she understood it, Esther fell off her bicycle when she was eleven. She hit a crack in the sidewalk in front of the house on Pine Point, flipped forward over the handlebars, and landed on her head. Spent a week and a half in the hospital with multiple concussions. Her face was pretty mangled. If you look closely at some of the old pictures, you can see a scar that begins over her left eye and disappears into her hair. And though the doctors said she was a hundred percent golden, it has always been my grandmother’s private belief (this from Olivia, not my mother) that Esther never fully recovered from falling off her bike.

I have this not-so-distant memory. A day on my father’s sailboat on Lake Michigan in 1984, four years before Esther’s death. She is there with us. She wears dark sunglasses. My brother and my grandparents are there, too. An afternoon of sailing, an attempt at reconciliation years after Lloyd’s flight, the time at Reed Hospital, Esther’s move home. The day had been uneventful. My father made a point of staying away from the cockpit, away from Esther, and spent most of the afternoon fiddling with the sails, winching and rerigging. My grandfather manned the helm. My grandmother and Esther mostly stared at the lake and sometimes spoke about the proper amount of suntan lotion and whether the buildings in the distance were Waukegan or Lake Forest. It happened, as a lot of things do in this family, just when we were about to leave each other.

My brother and I have already helped our grandparents into the dinghy, the small motorboat which will take us from our mooring, in the middle of the harbor, back to the dock. My father offers Esther his hand. She waves him off — saying she doesn’t need any help. Then her foot tangles in the lifeline and she trips, falls into the boat, lands in the dinghy kid’s lap. My father does not laugh, only says, “Jesus, Esther, I told you and now look, you killed the kid.”

“Fuck off, Philip,” Esther says mildly.

My father steps down into the boat and sits next to me. We sway. He faces Esther. He says, “I work my ass off, taking you out here. Buy you lunch. The whole time you sit — and now you talk to me like dirt. You think I’m dirt?” Esther stares at him. Then she opens her little yellow purse and takes her wallet out. Yanks a twenty-dollar bill, balls it, and throws it at my father. We’re puttering along in the boat now, all six of us squeezed, knees mashed together. The ride lasts no more than forty seconds, from my father’s boat to the dock. My father flings the money back at her. Esther picks it up from the dirty puddle of brown water between them. They are both in their forties. I am twenty-three and home from college and hot and sweaty and want off this little boat. My grandmother wears a white headband and a plastic visor. My grandfather dons his navy cap. My grandmother yawns loudly. My grandfather feels his breast pockets for cigarettes. Though I cannot see my brother’s eyes — he is sitting behind me — I know he is reading for the thousandth time the names that are printed in wavy letters on the sterns of boats bigger than my father’s. Unfazed, Wilmette, Illinois. Part-time Lover, Chicago, Illinois. Again, my aunt throws the soggy money back. It lands in my father’s lap. He picks it up again, crumples it. This time it hits Esther’s shoulder and she leaves it. Now she stares over the boat at the oily water slushing into small white waves. I don’t look at my father, whose face is splotched red, watching the money. I grab the bill and stuff it in my pants, and half-mutter at the dinghy kid, who looks about twelve: “In this family you pick up the crumbs.” But the kid doesn’t laugh, knows this isn’t funny. He knows it should be, but there’s something about these people that makes none of it funny. This ignoring older woman in white and the daydreaming captain. These two graying, infantile throwers, brother and sister. When Esther noticed the money was gone, she looked at me and said, “Split it with your brother.”

Oh, those people couldn’t tell you you have a cold. But they shuttled her around for tests. And then more tests. Tests tests. You wouldn’t believe how many hospitals there are in Chicago where you can get a test. Enormous hospitals ten blocks long you never even heard of. Finally, Reed Mental Health Center. Out near Palos Heights, wherever that is. They gave her a nice room. It had wallpaper, cream-colored. They tried to make it homey, and I give them credit for that. Say what you want about those people, and of course they’re all monsters, but that’s what they get paid for. Her diagnosis changed every week. The liars. But even so, they treated her well, and Esther…You know how Esther is in any social situation, even after all that. She organized things. A drama club. Gave piano lessons. She led nature walks. A troop of foot-dragging loons following Esther by a couple of feeble trees, and Esther would say, That’s a Dutch elm, that’s a white birch. She didn’t know any more about trees than I do. Certainly no one wanted it to happen. And your father? No. I’m going to leave him out of this — he did what he thought was right, and there was no arguing with him. But once it happened, I was against it. Understand that. Remember it. I went to the court and screamed at the judge, and they had to practically carry me out. One of the police officers whispered that if I wasn’t careful I’d follow my daughter to the bin. Times were different then — if he said that now I’d write a letter to the governor and get him fired. But finally it was better for her. I’ll say that. The drugs, yes. But also the stability. At Reed she didn’t have to carry herself. Go to the store. Visiting her made the whole thing look tempting, let me tell you…And she didn’t hate me as much when she lived there. Of course you know that changed, and she let me know the devil she thought I was. Don’t care about anybody too much, Leo. You aren’t doing them any favors.

“I don’t feel the kicking anymore.”

“You’re just getting nervous because it’s close to the time.”

“Lloyd.”

“It’s not unusual for the movement to lessen toward term. Many studies have shown—”

“No shifting. Nothing. A week ago it was kicking and now—”

“It’s normal. Don’t get upset. I’m telling you.”

“No. I don’t feel any kicking.”

Because he refused to stop loving her. Not because she was jealous. Not about who he was screwing in the linen closets at the hospital. I watch Lloyd watch the spot at Pritzger’s where they took Esther’s casket away. With all the people who knew her chatting quietly, respectfully…After the baby died. Because he assaulted her with his optimism and his willful infuriating blindness. This I don’t need anyone to tell me across the kitchen table over coffee. That screaming, that jabbing. Because Lloyd couldn’t see that the death of her baby was punishment for giving in so easily.

It’s what he could never understand. He thought she’d settle into her life because that’s what people did. He bumps shoulders with his new pretty doctor wife, but doesn’t feel her. He hears his wife conversing with the little French woman. Their words mean nothing. Twelve years since he last saw Esther, but the wall that time built has always been hollow.

They released her after ten months. (My grandmother had been telling anyone outside her closest circle that Esther was traveling abroad.) The divorce decree gave her next to nothing because of the evidence of physical abuse. She had nowhere else to go, so my grandparents gave her Olivia’s old basement room, the room Olivia had slept in during the four years she lived in the new house before she retired and moved home to the city to live with her sister full time. My grandfather got Esther a job at a credit bureau in Wheeling — she’d always been strong with numbers. At my grandfather’s urging she’d been an accounting major at Illinois (although she never got a degree). Everyone was grateful that numbers seemed to come back quickly for her. After six months at home, she even bought a car. She was thirty-nine when she moved back in with my grandparents. She told my grandmother she was going to move out soon, but she never did. By all accounts she got along well at work. Her employer — a thick-necked man who kept honking into a napkin — spoke lovingly of her at the funeral: She was the one everyone in the office went to. You see? Esther understood things, outside-of-work things. She made a few friends and used to go out for drinks with them at the Wooden Nickel in Highwood. At home, she was silent most of the time. While my grandparents no longer hosted parties, they often went to them. On some weeknights Esther ate dinner with my grandparents, but most nights she ate alone downstairs. Soups out of a cup heated in the microwave. Simple salads. Noodles. She never appeared on holidays. After the money toss on the boat she refused outright to go to my father’s house, and would not come up from the basement if he was present, so I rarely saw her during those years. I do know that she read considerably during the last eight years of her life. I often noticed gaps on my grandfather’s shelf of Harvard Classics. Writers like Hugo and Dostoevsky were often missing, but also the other names — the ones I’d never heard of — were gone too: Valera, Björnson, Daudet, Kielland, Musset.

I remember she came into my grandfather’s study once while my brother and I were over. My father wasn’t around. She sat silent. I watched her scan my grandfather’s bookshelf as we sat and talked, and my grandfather laughed, leaned back in his swivel chair and told us his own most famous story. I was too old for the war, you understand? But that wasn’t going to stop me, no sir. Signed up for the local Coast Guard out of a sense of duty, a man has to have a sense of duty. And so they sent me out to search for Hitler’s submarines in the Calumet River on the southwest side! This was the part of the story when, on cue, my brother and I had always laughed when we were younger. We did that day, too. My grandfather pointed at us and shouted: But no, boys! I didn’t laugh! I went — patriot that I was and am — and scoured every inch of that river for sauerkraut. Ha! Did such a good job they sent me to the South Pacific. I watched her not listening, never listening — how many times had she heard all this? — looking over the books. She was plumper and shorter, it seemed, almost squat, but her face was still the face of Esther Burman from the high school photographs. The high-arched eyebrows, small mouth, tightly pulled-back hair. She was wearing new white running shoes. Suddenly she stood. She waited until we all stopped talking and looked at her. Then she left the room without a wave or a nod.

And some weeknights during those years, my grandfather would shut himself in his study with his Scotch and the Tonight Show and Esther would blame my grandmother for everything. Slam the microwave door and say, Look what you created. And my grandmother would sit at the glass table in the kitchen (out the window, in the dark, my grandfather’s little tomato garden) and whisper, I only wanted the best for you. Only the best, but even your father (and what does he ever notice?) knew that Lloyd was a nothing and I should have known, too. It’s not Lloyd, Mother. It’s never been Lloyd. What’s it going to take for you to understand? But running off with a nurse like that. It’s enough to make you retch. That you insisted. It’s not what you insisted on that ruined me. I never forced. You make it sound like I had a gun to your head. I didn’t say force. Christ, if you forced I might have known better than to listen to any of it. Any of it! And then, this is what my grandmother told me, Esther would know that was wrong, that they were both wrong about everything, and she would start to shriek. Then the shriek would turn into a gagging laugh that sounded like choking, and in his room my grandfather would stand and turn up the volume on Johnny Carson.

Esther’s grave lies next to her daughter’s. The gray markers are flush to the grass, modest, but solid. The man in the cemetery office tells me that they are made of pressure-tested granite from Barre, Vermont. “It’s a perpetual stone,” he says.

With my index finger I smooth away the dirt from the valleys in letters.

Beloved Daughter and Mother

And yes I want to say something. I hadn’t known that I would, but I do now. That one way of looking at you, and what I know of you is that so much of your life was a begging off and a begging off until — that was the cruelty. That when you finally dared, you lost.

“So Esther knew before it happened?”

“Not for certain. How could she have known for certain? I suppose she couldn’t have. But yes, a month before, she called me — not crying — and said, ‘Mother, Lloyd says everything is fine, that they often stop moving, but I know. A mother knows.’ She was right.”

Esther Burman died of breast cancer on October 27, 1988. It was fast and deadly, and my grandmother drove her to the hospital every other day for treatment and finally, to stay for good, and Esther screamed and swore at her because she didn’t want to die in spite of what most people thought. A cruelty of the cancer was that she was so drugged she couldn’t read novels. My grandmother sat in the silence as her daughter stared at the turned-off television. Another hospital, this one a normal one — one she could tell people at the club about — but so much worse.

Like my father, I never went to see her in that last hospital, either.

I stand in front of Olivia and her sister’s house on West Van Buren. Late October 1989. Most of the leaves have fallen to the little brown lawn in front of the house, a low bungalow squeezed between two squat brick apartment buildings. A couple of boys on bicycles chase each other down the street. Olivia shouts from the screen door. Her sister Mag hovers behind her with a plate heaped with brownies and cookies and chocolates. I hug Olivia hard; she is still strong and feels — like she always did — pillowy and starchy. Her white hair pulled back tight and there is far less of it. A hollowing, some sinking below her eyes, makes me want nothing more than to curl up with her and just lie there. She’s laughing. Her sister’s laughing. Leooooooo. Olivia yanks me into the house and pushes me into a puffy chair and sits down so close our knees and feet touch. The living room is crowded with chairs; the coffee table has been taken over by framed photographs. So many relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and I never knew a single one. The blinds are half drawn. Thin lines of dusty afternoon light crisscross the room.

“Esther’s dead,” I say.

“You think I was born last Tuesday? I know Esther’s dead. A year ago this month she passed.”

“Nana didn’t want to upset you.”

“Upset herself! The business of that! I raised the girl. Upset me!”

“Nana was so devastated. She couldn’t even think—”

“You’re telling me about it? Now she calls me twice a week to cry about it. But don’t think I didn’t give her a taste of lip for not telling me about the funeral. What do you want to protect an old woman from? What haven’t I seen already? You’d think nobody ever died on me, with that woman calling me with news that’s not news anymore.”

“That poor girl’s life,” Mag says. “Ravaged.”

“Nana couldn’t even walk into the funeral home,” I say. “We had to hold her up. You know what it would take for her to accept help like that.”

Olivia nods slowly and laughs a little. “Sometimes she went around like she never had a housekeeper her whole life. That woman. I can see her. Grieving enough for everybody.”

“She calls to talk about Esther?”

“Yes, twice a week. Some days I put the phone down on the counter and just let her go on. My ears get tired. I do the crossword. Ask Mag. Sometimes three times a week.”

“It’s true,” Mag says.

“But enough of that. Enough.” Olivia whaps my knee. “Talk about you.”

Mag brings tea. She’s a large woman with a soft step across the carpet; she loves to have guests. Not to talk to them, but to serve them, watch them, anticipate them. Olivia used to talk to her on the kitchen phone for hours while Mag uh-huhed. I know, because I used to listen from my grandfather’s study. And if I was hungry I’d pick up the phone — then hang it up right away, pick it up, hang it up, pick it up. I did it till Olivia started hollering across the house that if I dared do that one more time she’d call her lawyer on me. Her lawyer, my father.

“You look like you did when I was twelve.”

“Don’t lie to this face, Leo. I’m so old. I never thought people got so old.”

“You don’t look so old.”

“Old as your grandpapa. Born in the same month. August 1909.”

“He’s back to fighting the Japanese full-time.”

“Well, that man. That’s what he was about. That war. Only thing that didn’t bore Mr. Burman was that over-with war.”

“Esther,” I say, “do you mind—”

“Uh-oh, Mag. Here he goes. Don’t I always say this one’s the poker. Always meddling in boxes. Sniffing around in the backs of drawers, my purse. Always eavesdropping on people. Used to drive his grandmother to howling for the police. Leo at her bedroom door listening to her on the phone, with his ear pressed up against the bottom of one of her good cocktail glasses.”

“When Esther was pregnant—”

“What kind of boy listens to two old gossips talking about nonsense?”

“There’s something I think I remember. I just want to know if—”

“Oh, Leo, please. Leave her be. You waste time.”

Olivia turns to her sister. “She used to call herself the swelly-belly girl. Used to take the train out to us and walk around rubbing her stomach like a basketball.”

“I remember you telling me,” Mag says, handing me the plate again.

With my free hand I tug Olivia’s arm. “The time when I found that cat. Wasn’t Esther in the house that day?”

“That kitty!” Olivia grabs hold of Mag, who has tried to escape to the kitchen for more of everything. “Listen, honey. We had three cats already and Mr. Burman hated every single one of them. He’d howl about wringing their necks every time one of them brushed his ankle. And this one goes outside and hauls in another one.”

“It was just sitting there under the swings.”

“Most adorable thing you ever saw. One gray paw. Well, the other cats are already starting to hiss, so I put the kitty in Mrs. Burman’s downstairs powder room, with a heap of dirt.”

“For litter,” Mag says. “I think I heard this story. And then the Grandpa comes home early from the bank.”

“And he had to go to the bathroom,” I said. “Came in, didn’t say hello, marched straight to the bathroom.”

Olivia laughs. “Yeah, but we didn’t know that yet. That man was always barging by people with his head down like that. Man moved through houses like Dick Butkus. That day was no different. How could I know he was going to use Mrs. Burman’s powder room? He never set foot in there. Room was smaller than he was. But something made him, and he opens the door and starts hollering about the pile of dirt like he never saw dirt before. Then he saw kitty hiding behind the toilet and yelled, ‘Ollie — there’s a goddamn skunk in the bathroom.’ ”

“Right. He went a little berserk.”

“And then—”

“Esther. You remember?”

She turns to me and her eyes aren’t laughing anymore. “Leo—”

“But she was there?”

“Yes. I remember. She shouted at everybody to come into the living room. She said, Forget about your cats, folks. Forget the skunks, everyone…”

I nod.

“You got it,” Olivia says, because she knows I hear it, too. “That girl saying, ‘This baby’s dancing, dancing up a storm.’ And she stood up on the couch and let us feel her, and maybe it was true, but I didn’t feel anything. ‘Dancing the cha-cha,’ she said. And your papa standing by the door in his tie. He even smiled. ‘The cha-cha, my ass,’ he says.”

“The turkey trot,” Mag says, and guffaws. “That’s some nuthouse over there.”

“She said cha-cha?” I ask.

“Like it was this morning,” Olivia says.

We sit for a while, the three of us, looking at the carpet, at the pictures on the coffee table. Boys in school photographs against powder blue backgrounds, canned smiles. Then Olivia whispers like Mag’s in the kitchen and can’t hear us, as if this is something not for Mag’s ears, even though she’s sitting right there with us. All she wanted was to kiss that baby alive. And I look at Mag, who’s staring at one of the pictures as if all this reminds her of someone else.

The scuttling together people do by a window during a storm. We are like that. The funeral will be closed casket. This is the private family viewing. My father steps closer and looks at her. Esther’s hands are twined so tight they make a single fist. Then he removes a hand and touches her. This sister in beige taffeta, heavy makeup, a wig. He does this. It’s a part of your story even if you don’t want it. He takes his hand out of his pocket and reaches into the casket, and at least one finger touches your fist. Skin that never met in life. My grandmother presses her wet forehead into the back of my neck and murmurs.

Knuckles meet the sorority house door, but softly. Though he’s been running, he doesn’t want to knock yet. The door hard and looming beneath his fingers. It’s this moment he wants. The almost seeing her, not the seeing. Years later, after the first of many ends, Lloyd will still conjure this beautiful almost. His hesitant approach down the long corridor toward their apartment, his fear, his shoes noiseless across the carpet. The unlocking of their door. Her emergence from the bedroom that was never his even when it was his to sleep in. How it all whirls him back. Mrs. Roachwell, Mrs. Roachwell, I’m coming. Tell that boy to stop shaking in his boots! That first burst of Esther into any room.

The Waters

THEY DIDN’T HAVE a dime. Nobody they knew did either (except their daughter’s husband, Seymour, and he probably stole it); it was 1939. But when Rachel Shlansky wanted something, it was only a question of when. So they gave their store away for a song—“Ten Cents a Dance,” Louie crooned — and moved south to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they opened a small café on East Malvern, around the corner and three blocks down from Bathhouse Row. Rachel waited on the tables. Louie cooked behind a screen so people couldn’t see his shakes.

Louie Shlansky was a gaunt, kind, terribly short-legged man with an acid tongue and no bite, who loved to tell stories on himself. They were all lies, worse than lies. Rachel called them perversions, but Louie loved to make people laugh; he didn’t give a damn how. Besides, his philosophy was that stories are more believable when yours truly is the punch line. Rachel, who was literal about everything, used to tell people, No, I was there the whole time, and nothing even remotely like that happened. But after the shakes attacked him, a little man, with such vengeance, she let him have whatever joys were left. It didn’t take much for her to hold her tongue while he blathered onward. Like his famous and always-more-stupid-than-the-last-time-he-told-it nonsense about the time the police mistook him for a ranking member of the Chicago branch of the Purple Boys. You want to know? I’ll tell you. You ever been to Bedlam? Two cops, Cheesus, running me down like I’m Jew Kid Grabiner. Look at me. I look anything like Jew Kid Grabiner to you? So I’m hightailing two miles, no seven, seven miles, before I fall down a manhole on South Halsted. The dumb paddies tumble in behind me, so the three of us are down there groping in the dark, and one of them goes, Anybody got a light? And I say, You kidding? I’ve got cigars! And the other cop says, See, I knew this guy was a Purple Boy, and they start whacking me with their sticks, and I’m shouting, Boys, boys, you got it all wrong, I’m a butter-and-egg man, I only do sundries on the side!

Behind his back and sometimes in front of it, his pals in Rogers Park called Rachel “the claw.” To them she was a fiend, a woman with moles on both cheeks the size of cow’s nipples. She was the local eyesore. But she was also, as everybody well knew, the brains (and the brawn) behind their operation. Louie was owner of Louie’s in name only. It was her place, and she’d lorded over it for more than twenty-five years from her post at the cash register. Then one day something happened, her brain clogged up, and she dragged Louie away, away to die in Arkansas. More bizarre is that she did it in the middle of some of the blackest days anybody’d ever seen. But Rachel, hard as she was, used to wail in her sleep after seeing him in such pain. She read in a pamphlet that the warmer climate and yes, the waters, the miracle thermal baths of Hot Springs, could ease some of the worst of symptoms, the ceaseless trembling, for one. She was a hard woman and maybe hideous to look at, his friends said, but she loved that man without embarrassment, which was more than they could say for their own wives. And though she spent much of their mutual working day berating him for his generosity (whenever she was in the back room, Louie smuggled groceries to people without writing it on a tab), everybody knew she babied him behind the closed doors of their apartment upstairs. She washed him; Louie Shlansky never slept on sheets that weren’t crisp. Rachel decreed it. Hot Springs. And they were going to open that café they talked about when they were first married, those days when their bodies were still young and unravaged. At first he protested: What about Bernice and the babies? And our customers? This block will starve. Is that what you want? To start another potato famine? This is how it started in Ireland. The best people left and then came the fungus.

She knew losing his audience alone might kill him. But what’s the use of an audience when all you’ve got is soil in your throat? “Imagine the shaking stopping,” she whispered fiercely. “Imagine it.” She stroked his cheek with the inside of her fist. They were in the kitchen. In the gloom of early morning in chill Chicago April. Outside, it looked the gloom of December. It was Sunday and the store would be shut all day in deference to the law, but they’d long made a habit of getting up at 5:45 every morning. He looked at her and didn’t exactly agree; surrendered would be a better word, since it wasn’t, finally, up to him. If she hadn’t shooed him away so she could swamp the floor, he would have told her he was grateful. He so rarely thought of himself, the self he didn’t invent. Strange to think that his comfort was so important you had to pick up and move a house.

In the kitchen that morning, he didn’t need to tell her he was grateful. She knew. In the ash light, she knew. She also knew that whatever she did, his was a fragile life; the move alone might kill him. But she would never be able to forgive herself for standing pat. Hot Springs. Lucky Luciano and Al Capone went there. Jack Dempsey. George Raft. Eleanor Roosevelt, too. The Illinois Central and the Chicago and Rock Island took the rich down there in sleeping cars. They came from the East Coast and Hollywood to promenade the clean white sidewalks and bathe. Rachel’s pamphlet said that at Hot Springs you were either about to take your bath, taking your bath, or just getting through with your bath. There were stories of cripples walking again, even running, climbing trees, after a day or two in those waters.

One week before they left, she gave a party in his honor. All of the 800 block of Fargo Avenue crowded into the flat above the store. Louie stood, as usual, inside the circle, his wine sloshing, telling about the time his secondhand zeppelin crashed into the Indian Ocean and he got rescued by a canoe-load of Potawatomi squaws who thought he was handsome and so scalped him for free even though their normal price was $3.50. “It’s why I have no hair,” he said. Rachel stayed in the kitchen, silent.

Her frivolous daughter, Bernice, the dancer, whirls in, balancing two glasses in each palm. Just had another baby, a daughter, Esther, and now look at her. Already slim and careless. Overdressed as usual tonight. Pearls in a year like this. Can you imagine? Bernice sets the plate and the glasses safely on the table, widens her eyes and implores, again, “This is madness. Look how happy—”

“What! I die for that man every day and you come here all tarty and—”

“Nobody else can love him?”

“How much did you pay for those pearls?”

“Hot Springs, Mother. You’ll make him a servant. The kind of money people throw around down there, you don’t understand.”

“I asked you never to speak of money in this house.”

“I can’t have an opinion. Only you can—”

“You bring shame.”

“Traipsing him off to a place he doesn’t know a soul? Him? Who loves nothing more than sitting on the stoop with Manny and Uncle Nort.”

“You don’t know.”

“How do you expect him to cook in some restaurant if he can no longer even work the stock in the store? Anyway, Seymour says he can find a place for him. That he can sit at a desk. He wanted me to tell you.”

Rachel’s face twitches, but she doesn’t roar. It’s as though she hasn’t heard this most terrible of all suggestions, that she accept her son-in-law’s charity. She looks at her feet and says quietly, even meekly, “The waters. You don’t know about the waters. The radioactivity enlarges the blood vessels. I read it.”

Bernice, too, looks down at her mother’s battered shoes. She knows she has a better pair in the closet, that she wore these for her, so that Bernice would be certain to see how poor, her struggles…Yet, even so, she can’t help being sucked in a little by her mother’s faith. It’s something she gave up on years ago, and about more things in her life than her father’s health. Nonetheless, it’s her mother. Bernice can’t stop herself from firing: “Your waters are a fraud, Mother, a cover for the gambling. Seymour says it got so bad a few years ago the mayor had to fire the entire police force. He also says everybody there has gonorrhea.”

“Seymour, Seymour, Seymour. Where’s Seymour, who loves your father so much?”

“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.

Bernice watches the February sun retreat from the bay window that looks out upon the slope of the ravine and the skeletal winter trees. The new house so huge and still around her, she can’t help feeling like an intruder in its silence. And what kind of house is this if her mother doesn’t live upstairs?

The vision appears slowly in the gray doom of the enormous window. It’s a kitchen in Arkansas. A room she saw for less than an hour, so long ago now it happened to someone else, when she went to retrieve the papers, the photographs, the little furniture left to salvage. The sad black man who answered the door and didn’t move his head when she told him the news. The dirty kitchen walls and the chair by the soiled bed. The filth. The filth is what startled her the most, that her mother had let it all go—

In the window her mother, barefoot and in a loose house-dress, hovers over the bed. Her father is so shriveled under the blankets, his body is nothing more than a small lump. He’s wearing a hat, a brown derby, that swallows his head. Bernice can’t see his face. She watches her mother lean closer and sees everything. Her mother’s bare feet, the grease-smudged walls, the cloudy window above the stove with its crack, a yellow fissure in the upper right corner. The lump that is her father, that hat. Feels her father’s soft wheeze in the hollow of her mother’s throat. Tell me something, Louie, a lie, a bamboozle. Anything. Her mother waits.