Текст книги "Gypsies"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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Chapter Nine

They came over a long wooded ridge and Laura could see the town, then, shouldering up against the Monongahela River, one more fucked-up old mill town, the ancient coke ovens and rolling mills and blast furnaces fouling the air—but not the way they did when times were prosperous—and the slatboard houses and the row houses all built back in the twenties or earlier, when the railroads were making money and the demand was big for rolled steel and bituminous coal.

The sight of Polger Valley from this height invoked a rush of memory so intense that she pulled the car over to the gravel shoulder, her hands clenched on the wheel. She had never lived here—had left home a month before Mama and Daddy moved from Duquesne—but it was like every other place they had lived; it was like Duquesne and it was like Burleigh; it was like Pittsburgh with its hills and narrow streets. She looked at Karen beside her, Karen with her eyes fixed somewhere off beyond the river. “You drive,” Laura said. “You know the way.” Her sister shrugged.

Laura walked around the car to the passenger side. Her legs felt hard and tense from driving. It was a cold, late, cloudy afternoon; the ragged hillside maples were spindly and bare. Streetlights blinked on in the distant, empty industrial alleys along the river.

Climbing back into the car, she glanced at Michael in the rear seat. He was gazing out blankly over the valley, lost in some thought. He had been like this —sullen like this—ever since California.

She rolled up her window. “Cold back there?”

He only shrugged.

Last week, in a hotel room outside Cleveland, Laura had asked him why he was so quiet these last few days. Karen had gone shopping for winter clothes; Michael was sitting on the bed, watching a football game with the sound turned down. He looked up at her briefly, unhappily. “Am I?”

“Yes. But not just quiet. Pissed-off quiet. So who are you mad at, Michael?”

He shrugged.

She said, “At me?”

“Do I have to talk about it?”

“No. Of course not. But we’re living in each other’s pockets and there’s no way around that. It might make life easier if you did.”

He shrugged again. “I just think it’s stupid… all this should have happened before.”

“All this?”

“What we’re doing. Where we’re going. What we’re finding out.” He straightened his shoulders. “I mean, you knew what you were. All your life. All three of you did. But nobody ever asked? Nobody said, Where did I come from, what am I? Not until now?”

He pressed his back against the wall of the hotel room, hugged his knees against himself. Laura said, “We were negligent and we screwed up your life—is that it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not just mine.”

“So, Michael, who should we have asked?”

“Who are you planning to ask?”

Well, all right, she thought. He was bright and he had a point. But he didn’t really understand. He was fifteen years old and everything seemed too obvious. “You don’t know what it was like back home.”

“I know, it was rough. But—”

“Michael, listen to me.” She sat down next to him, and maybe he sensed the seriousness in her voice, because he was quiet again, not sullen now but attentive. She said, “I did ask once. I was maybe five, maybe six years old. I went to Daddy. I showed him what I could do. Made a little window for him. A window into some nice place, a child’s idea of a nice place, a sunny day and, you know, flowers and meadows, and a deer standing there. I meant to find out whether he could do it. I think most of all I wanted to know what I was supposed to do with it, this strange little trick—what was it for?”

Michael said, “He wouldn’t tell you?”

“I don’t remember what he said. All I remember is showing him, wanting to ask him. And then I remember lying in bed. There were bruises on my face. Bruises on my arms. Five very clear bruises on my right arm above the elbow, and I knew he’d grabbed me there, that those bruises fit the shape and angle of his fingers.”

“He beat you,” Michael said.

“Yes. It sounds terrible, but… yes, that’s the word for it.”

“That’s sick.” Michael’s outrage was obvious and heartfelt. “You must have hated him for it.”

“No. I did not.”

Michael frowned.

She said, “Do you hate your father? I mean, hey, he walked out on you. Walked out on you and your mom. That’s a pretty big thing. You hate him for it?”

“No.” Cautiously now. “But that’s different.”

“Is it? Maybe it’s only a matter of degree.”

“He never beat me.”

“Should I have hated Daddy for that? Well, maybe you’re right… maybe I should have. Tim did, at least eventually. But, Michael, I was too young. When you’re five years old you don’t have that kind of hate in you. You forgive. Not because you want to but because you don’t have a choice. Can you understand that? Sometimes you forgive because there’s nothing else you can do.”

It was more than she had meant to say.

He looked at her steadily.

“But now,” he said, “you do have a choice.”

And there was nothing Laura could say to that– no answer she could think of.

They pulled up at the house just after dark.

It was an old row house on a hill that ran down toward the river, and behind it there was a steep wooded slope. The street was called Montpelier and it dead-ended against a chalky cliff.

This was not the greatest neighborhood. Some of these houses had been mended and repaired; many had not. Once upon a time, Laura thought, this would have been a street full of working people, Poles and Germans, but now, she guessed, most of these folks were laid off from the mills, and there were more than a few black faces peering out from shuttered windows as she parked beside the curb. Down where Montpelier met Riverside there was a big noisy bar; Riverside, a commercial street, was crowded with pawnshops, barred and locked at dusk.

Odd that her parents had stayed here so long. All my life, she thought, we moved every year, every two years. Sometimes because Daddy got laid off for drinking, sometimes for no discernible reason. Here, finally, they had settled. Maybe because they were alone together at last; maybe because Daddy had finally built up some seniority at the local mill.

Maybe because we left.

But now, she thought, we’re home.

There was a yellow bulb burning over the porch. Karen parallel-parked and Laura unloaded luggage from the trunk. Michael hefted a suitcase in each hand. He regarded the house warily. “So,” he said, “this is it?”

The screen door creaked open. Mama stepped out into the porch light. Laura’s hands were shaking; she clasped them together in front of her.

“Yes,” she told her nephew. “This is it.”

Chapter Ten

1

His mother and his aunt shared a second-floor bedroom, but Michael had the third floor of this old house all to himself.

He liked it up here. His grandparents were too old to climb the stairs, so everything was covered with a fine layer of undisturbed dust, and everything was antique: furniture, he guessed, they had been packing around all their lives. Michael was accustomed to the house in Toronto, a new house full of new things, as if nothing had existed before the year 1985; the Fauves’ third floor was a shocking contrast.

His grandmother had come up once that first night, gasping on the stairs. She apologized for the clutter. “All this mess,” she said sadly. “When Mama Lucille died we put all her stuff up here. So this is your family, Michael. See? This was your great-grandfather’s rolltop desk. That big old bed belonged to my parents …”

The bed had sat for so long in this room, and was so massive, that the floorboards had curved around it. His mother aired the sheets and pillowcases for him, but the bed retained a characteristic odor, not unpleasant, of ancient down and ticking, of whole lives lived between its sheets. Sleeping there these last few nights Michael had wished he could make windows into past time as well as across worlds: that he could gaze back down the years and maybe discover the secret of his strangeness. Wished this old bed could talk.

He spent a lot of time up here. Considering the situation in the house, it was better to be alone. And, anyway, he liked to be by himself. Alone, he could let his thoughts roam freely. Nothing to fear up here, no Gray Man, only these old high corniced rooms with their ripply windowpanes and the winter sky showing through; only the trickle of the water in the radiator grills. Lying here, suspended in down and history, he could allow himself to feel (but faintly, carefully) the rush of secret power in himself, the wheels of possibility spinning in him; to contemplate a step sideways out of Polger Valley and time itself; to wonder whether Aunt Laura’s instincts might not have been correct all those years ago, maybe there was a better world somewhere, a truly better world, and maybe he could reach it: maybe it was only a quarter step away down some hidden axis… maybe it was a door he could learn to open.

He thought about it often.

Downstairs, things were different. A week in this house had not inured Michael to all the silence and indignities.

His grandmother insisted on cooking. Every evening he helped her with the heavy china platters: chicken and gravy, roast beef and potatoes, meat loaf and boiled peas relayed steaming from the tiny kitchen to the dining room. Jeanne Fauve was overweight but not really fat; she was the kind of nervous woman whose metabolism runs fast. She was constantly in motion but the motion was inhibited, no large gestures but a lot of fluttering. Her hands moved like birds; her eyes darted like a bird’s eyes. She wore her hair in white spring curls bound tightly to her head. Michael kind of liked her and he thought she might like him—she would stare thoughtfully at him when she thought he didn’t notice. But if he looked directly at her, her eyes would dart away.

Tonight Michael helped her carry in a pot roast from the oven. Everything was in place: linen tablecloth, the china, the tarnished silverware. Everybody in their chair except Michael’s grandfather. Michael sat down at the foot of the table. He was hungry and the roast smelled wonderful, but he had learned to be patient. He put his hands in his lap; the mantel clock ticked. His mother whispered something to Aunt Laura.

Then, finally, Willis Fauve came ambling in from the downstairs bathroom, where he had washed his hands. Willis was not really a large man, Michael thought, but he was a big presence in the room. His forearms were big and he wore polyester pants cinched over his expansive belly and a starched white shirt open at the collar. He had a small face set in a large head, blunt features concentrated around heavy bifocals. He wore his hair in a bristly Marine cut and his thick eyebrows made him seem to be always frowning. Most of the time he was frowning. Certainly he did not ever seem happy.

Sometimes he would come to the table drunk. Not loudly or conspicuously drunk, but his walk would be unsteady and he would talk more than he normally did: mainly complaints about the neighbors. He would sit opposite Michael, and his acrid breath would waft across the table. Willis Fauve was a beer drinker. Beer, he said, was a food. It had food value.

Tonight Willis was just detectably drunk. Michael thought of him as “Willis” because he could not imagine calling this man “Grandfather.” Michael was acquainted with grandfathers mainly from TV: kindly, grizzled men in bib overalls. But Willis was not kindly; he was not even friendly. He had made it obvious that he regarded this visit as an intrusion and that he would not be happy until his privacy was restored. Sometimes—if he’d had enough to drink—he would come out and say so.

Willis sat down wheezing. Without looking at anyone he folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes. Michael was supposed to do the same, but he kept his eyes open. “Thank you, Lord,” Willis Fauve intoned, “for this food which you have seen fit to set before us. Amen.”

Michael’s grandmother echoed the “Amen.” Willis began to circulate the pot roast. Michael took modest helpings.

He felt his grandfather’s attention on him while he ate. He kept his eyes on his plate, worked his knife and fork mechanically. But he felt Willis watching him. His grandmother tried to make some conversation, the shopping she’d done, what the hairdresser had said, but nobody could think of anything to add and the talk ran out of gas. Michael had pretty much cleared his plate and was looking forward to the end of the meal when his grandfather said, too loudly, “You know what I call that shirt?”

Michael’s shirt, he meant. Michael was wearing a Talking Heads T-shirt he’d carried with him from Toronto. Black T with a red-and-white graphic. Nothing spectacular, but he was moderately proud of the way he looked in it.

Nobody wanted to answer the question but Willis himself. Willis said brightly, “I call that a fuck shirt.”

Michael regarded his grandfather with bewilderment.

“I see these kids,” Willis said. “I drive by the high school every morning. I see the way they dress. You know why they dress like that? It’s like sticking up their middle finger. It’s an insult. It’s ‘fuck you.’ They’re saying that with their clothes.”

Michael had observed that Willis, who complained about profane language on TV, loosened up in that regard when he was drinking.

Karen said, “Michael forgot to change before dinner.”

Michael looked at his mother sharply. She returned the look, a warning: Don’t say anything… not now.

“A fuck shirt,” Willis repeated.

“Michael,” Karen said, “go change.” When he didn’t move, she whispered, “Please!”

He stood up sullenly.

At the stairs Michael paused a second to look back at the dinner table, at the quiet tableau of the women with their heads contritely bowed, Willis Fauve still regarding him, frowning. They locked gazes briefly.

It was Willis who looked away. He said to Michael’s mother, “You let him dress like that?”

Michael moved on up the stairs.

“A fuck shirt,” Willis marveled, “at my dinner table.”

But Michael understood the significance of Willis’s complaint. It’s not the shirt, he thought. You know it, I know it. It’s not the shirt you’re afraid of.

In his room Michael thought about Willis and about the silence at the dinner table.

This attic room looked out over the rooftops of Polger Valley toward the river and the mill. The mill dominated the valley like a black, crouched animal. The chimney flues were black and smokeless against a hard gray dusk. Michael put his hand to the window and the glass felt icy under his fingers. Snow soon, he thought.

He kept his T-shirt on.

It wasn’t the shirt, of course; it was the power in him. Willis must have sensed that. Michael thought about what Laura had told him, some of the hints his mother had dropped. He understood that the T-shirt was itself irrelevant; that Willis might as easily have objected to his haircut, his shoes, the way he held his fork. What he really meant was: here is this new person under my roof and I don’t control him and I don’t like that.

Michael understood because the house in Toronto had operated the same way, though without the implied threat of violence. He recognized in Willis the shadow of his mother’s cryptic silences. He had grown up in that silence. The vacancy of unpronounced words. This wasn’t a new thing with Willis, only louder and more frightening.

He wondered whether that was the way it always worked in families, whether fears were passed on from generation to generation, like the color of a person’s hair or eyes. Maybe it was like a curse, something you could never escape, something you carried with you whether you wanted to or not.

But, he thought, some things do change. Willis depended on his ability to scare people, and it worked: Michael’s mother was frightened of him; even Laura was frightened of him…

But not me, Michael thought.

Not me.

He lay on his bed in the gathering dark and watched an early-winter show begin to beat against the window. He felt the tremble of the power in himself and thought, Hell, I’m a long way beyond Willis Fauve. He doesn’t scare me.

2

When Karen stopped in to say good night Michael was already dozing. Cradled in the old bed, he looked almost like a child again. Predictably, he still had the T-shirt on. Rather than wake him, she folded the comforter around him and tiptoed to the door.

He stirred long enough to raise one eyelid. And he said a strange thing, faintly, from the depths of his sleep.

He said, “Don’t be afraid.” “I won’t,” Karen said. “Sleep now.” She eased the door shut.

But she was afraid.

She was afraid of the Gray Man and she was afraid of her father.

It surprised her, the depth of her fear. Maybe it was predictable, maybe she should have expected it. After all, what had changed? Well, she was an adult now, she had been married, had lived on her own. Those things should make a difference. But they didn’t, and maybe that wasn’t unusual; maybe these angles of connection—parent to child, father to daughter—were permanent, timeless. Around Willis she was a child again, hapless and awed. It was not what he said but the force with which he said it… the absolute masculine certainty he projected. The words were like doors into a private blast furnace Willis Fauve kept stoked inside himself; through the words, she could feel the heat.

The next day, after Willis left for work, she helped her mother with the laundry; in the afternoon she carried the plastic laundry basket up to the second floor where Laura was waiting. Karen sat with her sister in the guest room folding sheets. The sheets were warm from the basement dryer; the fabric softener had imparted a faint, delicate scent of lavender.

Laura said, “We’re not getting anywhere.”

“I know,” Karen said. This frightened her, too: this motionlessness. “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

“It’s hard because nothing’s changed.” Laura whirled a sheet out over the bed. “Everybody’s older but nothing’s different. They say you can’t go home again, but the scary thing is that you can—it’s too easy to step back into all the old mistakes.”

Karen said, “Mistakes?”

“You know what I mean. He rules this house. You saw him at dinner, yelling at Michael. And we sat there. We took it. Nobody challenges Willis Fauve, no, sirree—not on his turf.”

“Well, it is, isn’t it? It is his turf.”

“It was our home for twenty years, for God’s sake! We lived under his roof like prisoners—it was only Tim who ever spoke up.”

But, Karen thought, look what happened to Tim. Tim had disappeared out into the big world; for all anyone heard from him he might as well be dead. Maybe was dead. Maybe worse. Maybe the Gray Man had found him.

But she folded that traitorous thought into a dresser drawer along with the spare sheets. “Tim was braver than us.”

“Brave or stupid. Or maybe he just liked getting bruised. But at least he fought back.”

Karen thought privately that Tim was like a small frightened dog: the harder you kick him, the more he tries to bite… until he chews through the rope and runs away. Tim, after seventeen years of this life, had finally gnawed through his rope. She said, “We won’t find out anything from Daddy.”

“We haven’t tried to find out anything from anybody.” Laura smoothed the sheet over the mattress and slipped the two old pillows into their flowered cases. “It’s Mama we should talk to.”

“She won’t like it.”

“If we wait for her to like,” Laura said, “we’ll be here another twenty years.” It was undeniable.

“Now,” Laura said. “We should talk to her now.”

Karen hesitated and then wondered at her own reluctance. “Doesn’t it scare you at all—what she might say? Don’t you think about what it might mean —knowing?”

Laura walked with her to the stairs. They were sisters now for certain. No time had passed; they were altogether children. Laura said, “I’m more scared of what might happen if we don’t.” The house felt suddenly colder.

Mama was in the kitchen drying dishes.

How full of memories this house is, Karen thought. But it was not so much the house as the furnishing of it, the lay of things. The kitchen was like the kitchen in every other house they had lived in. The tile was peeling up, the cupboards were painted a dingy flat yellow color. Dish towels hung on a wooden rack; the dishes were stacked in a white Kresge’s drainer. Cups on cup hooks, pot holders in the shape of roosters tucked behind the toaster, a hand-stitched sampler on the wall bearing a passage from Proverbs. It was late afternoon and the kitchen window showed a dismal backyard terrain of powder snow and hillside and empty sky. Daddy would be home in an hour or two… longer if he stopped to have a drink.

It was Laura who had the courage to say, “Mama, we need to talk.”

Jeanne Fauve looked up briefly. “Talk about what?”

“Old times.”

Mama stood still for a few moments, then set down the dish she’d been drying and turned to face Laura. Her expression was hooded, unreadable. “Wait here,” she said finally, and bustled out of the room.

Karen sat with her sister at the kitchen table, tracing patterns with her finger in the chipped Formica. How old was this table? As old as herself? My God, she thought, we don’t need to dig up the past: it’s here, it’s all around us.

Mama came back with a shoe box under her arm. She sat down at the table and pried up the lid.

Inside the box there were pictures.

Mama said, “These are the old days. All these photos.” She emptied them onto the table.

Karen sifted through the pile. The photographs had aged badly. She remembered the various cameras Mama used to own: a Kodak Brownie, which had produced most of these mirror-finished black-and-white pictures; and later a big plastic Polaroid camera, the kind where the photograph rolled out by itself and then you had to wipe it down with some evil-smelling preservative.

“Here,” Mama said. “The house on Constantinople… you remember?”

Karen inspected the picture. Daddy must have taken it: it showed Mama standing by their new car, a steely blue Rambler parked in front of the house. Karen and Laura and Tim stood listlessly in the background leaning against the porch railing. How bored we look, Karen thought. It must have been a church day: everyone was dressed up, Mama in her pillbox hat with the preposterous black mesh veil, Karen and Laura in white starched dresses. Tim wore a black suit and collar. How Tim had always hated those collars. It made his child face seem piggish, baby fat pushed up into his chin.

Briefly, dizzyingly, she remembered her dream, the ravine behind the house, the night they had passed into a grim world of Tim’s devising. And not just a dream. It was a memory. It was as real as this photograph.

She thought, If we had taken Mama’s Kodak Brownie through that Door we might have a picture now—a picture of that strange night city, a picture of the Gray Man.

In her mind the Gray Man said, Your firstborn son.

“Those were good days by and large,” Mama was saying. “Your father had steady work. And I think I loved that old house on Constantinople more than any place I’ve lived since. More even than this place.”

Laura said, “Then why did you leave?”

Laura was focused, alert: Laura had not been seduced by the photographs.

Mama said, “Well, you know. You remember what I used to tell you kids? We’re gypsies. We move around …”

Laura said, “That’s not a reason.”

Mama hesitated, then turned back resolutely to the photographs. “Here’s the apartment in the West End. Karen, you were in fifth grade that year. That was your birthday party—you remember that? Here’s where we moved in Bethel. That’s Tim on the streetcar going downtown. Here we are with Mama Lucille taking the boat tour around the Point, I guess it was 1965 or ’66, the summer we had so many fireflies. Oh, and here I am—I was skinny in those days—riding up the Incline with your father. Here—”

Laura said, “There aren’t any baby pictures.”

Mama remained silent, her eyes on the pile of photographs.

Laura went on, “It just seems strange. No baby pictures. And the way we moved. I mean, there was Constantinople Street, there was Bethel; there was the West End, there was Duquesne. And we could have stayed on. Daddy wasn’t drinking so bad in those days. And I remember how we moved. Pack up and leave overnight. Like we were skipping out. But I remember how you always left the rent in a white envelope taped inside the door. So we were running, but not because of money.”

Mama said sullenly, “Is that why you came back here—to stir up all that old trouble?”

“Is it so wrong to want to understand?”

“Maybe. Maybe there was a good reason we left those places.”

“We’re all grown up now,” Laura said. “We have a right to know.”

“If it would help you,” Mama said vehemently, “you think I wouldn’t have told you? It was only ever to protect you … it was only so you could lead normal lives.”

Normal lives, Karen thought. She was passive now, a spectator in this exchange between her mother and her sister, thinking, A normal life is all I ever wanted. A normal life is what I wanted for Michael.

Laura said, “But we don’t lead normal lives.”

“But you could!”

“No. We can’t. Maybe for the same reason you couldn’t.” Laura held up a handful of the flimsy old photos. They looked, Karen thought, like so many brittle leaves. “Is he in here?”

Mama looked fearful. “Who?”

“You know who. Is he in here? Is he looking over somebody’s shoulder? Is he watching from the window across the street while Daddy waxes the Rambler? Is that why we moved all the time, because he found us on Constantinople Street and he found us in Bethel and he found us in Duquesne?”

Karen was holding her breath now. She thought of what Michael had said about the Gray Man on the beach, the way he had flicked that little girl out of the world with a gesture. With his eyes.

Mama said breathlessly, “You shouldn’t even talk about him. It could bring him back. It’s bad luck.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Laura said firmly. “He doesn’t need luck.”

“God help us,” Mama said. The kitchen clock ticked; a wind rattled the windowpane. Mama added faintly, “He found you?”

“He found Michael in Toronto,” Laura said. “He found all three of us in California. There’s no reason to believe he can’t find us here.”

“So much time passed… we thought you were safe.”

“Did you? What about Tim—is Tim safe?”

“I pray for Tim.” Mama lowered her head. “I pray for him the way I prayed for you all these years.”

Laura looked startled. She opened her mouth, closed it again.

Karen found herself speaking. “We need to know all there is to know.” The words spilled out. “Not just for us. For Michael’s sake.”

“It almost wrecked us,” Mama said quietly. “Do you understand? It could wreck us again… There’s nothing I can say to help you.”

“Please,” Karen said.

Her mother looked infinitely pained and, in that protracted moment, impossibly old. Her cotton print housedress dangled limply from her shoulders. Outside, the wind raised up a whirl of snow.

“I can’t,” she said finally. “Try to understand. I never spoke to anybody about this. It’s hard. Maybe later. I have to think…”

Then, at the front of the house, the door rattled and slammed. A draft of cold air swept in along the floor. Jeanne Fauve stood up, composing her face. “It’s your father,” she said, sweeping the photographs back into the shoe box. “I have to get dinner ready.”