Esther Stories by Peter Orner

Author:Peter Orner [Orner, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780316224697
Publisher: Mariner
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Awnings, Bedspreads, Combed Yarns

EYES SAUCERED by blue-gray half circles, Walt Kaplan watches them knock down City Hall in the name of progress. September 1971. The day is cloudless, the sky white. A helicopter dive-bombs like a horsefly and snatches the great gold eagle from the top of the dome and the crowd hollers, whoops, and the ball attached to the crane swings, the ball swings, and like a flatfoot man defenseless against a sidelong punch from nowhere, the old granite eyesore begins its inward crumble. The roar after each hit like the loudest bowling Walt’s ever heard. The men beside him on the sidewalk, in front of the post office, slap their hands and cheer and stomp their shoes and whoop some more. Nobody’s seen anything like this. The ball swings toward them, a freakish pendulum, and everybody takes a couple of steps back.

Murder is what this is. In fifty years of being alive and walking these streets, how many times a day did he look at this building? Though Walt’s known the worst times, he’s always been one to climb the rungs of the pit. During the hurricane of ’38, though he was young then, he’d laughed as trees took flight and roofs and chimneys landed in neighbors’ yards. Even now, they still call him a crack-up, the genuine article, a real Wisenheimer. At the annual masked poverty ball at the Legion, who knew what he’d show up in. A couple of years ago he went as Salvini the Elder and Salvini the Younger at the same time, painted two extra eyes on his cheeks—all the women were screaming. Last year he somehow jammed himself into his sister-in-law’s tutu. A man with half a million useless stories, Sarah says. (His favorite being how his father, dirty-faced Jewish kid from Lithuania, gets off at the wrong train station, fifteen years old, and thinks he’s in Boston, wanders around Fall River looking for Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester. And what doyouknow? By the mid-twenties, Kaplan’s Furniture’s got the biggest showroom in Fall River by five thousand square feet. Branch stores at 344 Columbia and the corner of Pleasant and 4th.)

Beloved store that was his, Walt’s, until ten days ago, when they knocked it down, too. Then there were no photographers, no police, no cheers, no helicopter swooping, only Walt, sweat-furious hands in his pockets, watching. “Exercising the state’s right of eminent domain,” the Department of Public Works lawyer had said slowly, as if the words were too difficult for a shopkeeper to understand. But he’d fought them for two years before he lost, in court, the right to own his own property. Then—because the law so ordered—they gave him a quarter of what the store was worth in the name of the good of the Commonwealth. In this country! You’d think Khrushchev was governor. And the idiot mayor proclaims Fall River will be a champion again. A return to the greatness of Spindle City, the Textile Capital of the World. That

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