If they swim, they swim, she said.
It shocked me. Was I to understand that what I witnessed happening around me wasn’t the result of a lack of ability but a calculated deliberation, even a theory about childrearing? I thought: You’re wrong. That’s not how you teach someone how to swim. That’s how you teach someone to be afraid of water. It was a costly experiment, I thought, the costliest of all, to experiment with your own children. I already had the sense that my siblings were not all equally capable of being left to their own devices in the deep end. When I was alone with my brother, he was like a little animal, he got so close and looked at me with his blue eyes wide open, and said: I love you, Mathilde. I love you. His tiny voice was like a song. He reminded me of my budgie, which was tame, but not tame enough that you could cup it in your palms. One time I’d brought it under the duvet with me, and there in the darkness it leaped into my hand to hide. When I was alone with Eugene, he leaped into my hand.
She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and inhaled deeply, caving in her cheeks. Jöst wait and see, she said. Waiting was the only thing I could do, I thought. I was eleven. The distance seemed insurmountable.
◊
The sweet smell of rot, moisture, and dust was everywhere in the house. It was strongest in the corners and most concentrated in the basement. There were many small rooms down there with pipes running in and out in the most complicated network, and in the center was a room so large that we could ride our bikes around it. There was a carpet thick with dust, and the walls were lined with beat-up furniture, things that had broken, and cardboard boxes filled with unused things. When we played hide-and-seek down there, I took a deep breath, sucking the air through my nostrils. The smell originated here. Not just the smell in the house, but everywhere.
I thought the basement smelled like America.
•
That first summer, my dad’s mother and sister, Gussie and Peggie, showed up, and they slept on foldaway beds in the big room in the basement. In the morning they emerged, already dressed, with wet hair from the shower down there. They went to the kitchen and put on aprons, and an aroma arose, from the kind of food that required a stove. They set the table in the dark dining room, which was normally never used, and in the evening we sat around the mahogany table, the entire family, and our hands began to pass around steaming bowls of baked ham or meatloaf or turkey with apples and prunes and sauce and chunky mashed potatoes and sweet corn.
Gussie and Peggy spoke with thick Southern accents. When they weren’t helping out in the house, they took us out for dinner, so my siblings’ mother could have a little peace and quiet. Eugene clung to my grandmother’s leg. We drifted to the basement, hopped on the furniture, biked around the carpet, circling them, they were good company, and radiated a practical warmth that reminded me of the women in my family back home, my mother and my grandmother and my godmother.
Peggy’s face was long, and her head was thick with dense dark curls like my grandmother’s. At one time she’d been the most popular girl in the school. She’d married the captain of the football team, Chan was his name, and because their son had been given the same name, they called the father Big Chan and the son Little Chan.
I hadn’t met either of them, neither my uncle nor my cousin, but I knew they lived on a ranch by a river, and that Big Chan was a real Texan of the kind who wore a cowboy hat and drove a pickup truck, shot deer, and drank whiskey.
A sadness hung over Peggy, circling her like a bird trying to land. Some years earlier I’d been awoken with terrible news. My mother had entered my room and told me that my cousin Kendall was dead, Little Chan’s big sister. I’d never met her either, only seen photographs, she was an adult, twenty years old, with long, reddish-blond hair, a color they called strawberry. A car accident returning from a wedding, there’d been four of them in the car, and none of the others got as much as a scratch. That’s all I knew of the accident. When I looked at Peggy, I thought of that sentence, not as much as a scratch, and about what would have happened if the injuries had been more equally distributed between them.
We tumbled around on the carpet, my grandmother sat on the bed talking with Peggy, who stood beside her rummaging for something in her toiletry kit. She found it, nail clippers, time to trim nails! She called for us, and one by one she inspected our feet. My siblings’ toenails were long and yellow, almost horny like animal claws. They didn’t look like kids’ nails at all. My siblings complained that it hurt to wear shoes. It hurt just to look at them. Apparently, Peggy couldn’t stand it either.
There wasn’t much daylight in the basement. There was a garden table with two corresponding benches next to their foldaway beds, and Peggy asked us to climb onto the table, so she could better reach with the clippers. My siblings willingly crawled up on the table, pleased with the attention, they liked being pampered by their Aunt Peggy, and when I was about to climb on the table, she held my arm softly and looked at me with eyes that said: not you. I said nothing, nor did she, but it was as if there were a thousand messages in that single glance. I was part of a larger community, it said, of children with mothers who clipped their nails. Then she began cutting my siblings’ nails. Eight feet, forty nails, from one end to the other.
They stayed for a week. When they went home, they took their singsong voices, their nail clippers, and the scent of proper food with them. The house returned to its usual routine of school, shopping, tv watching. If my dad was home, he worked in the inaccessible part of the house, reading papers and writing so quietly with his yellow pencil that you couldn’t tell he was there at all.
Sometimes I found him in the kitchen after we’d eaten. Alone, cooking a hamburger, a real patty with fresh ground meat and fried tomato and potatoes and juice. He would take a beer mug from the freezer, frost-white and steaming with cold, pour some Budweiser into it, and carry his plate to the round Formica table in the corner of the kitchen with a baseball game or the news running on the small tv, and eat his dinner, alone or with whoever happened to show up and sit with him.
I picture him that way now. With his fork in his right hand—the knife always resting on the edge of the plate, like an ornament, while he works his way through his meal with his fork, switching between using the side of the fork to half wrench, half cut a bite free and spearing it with the tines, lost in thought. He clears his throat, hacks-wiggles-wrenches-cuts, clears his throat again, thinks, chews as if he sees something in his mind’s eye, a film, and I sit beside him watching him as if he is a film, a projection on the rear wall, some distant being whose crackling image sat right there, sits right there, so far away and yet so close that I could easily reach out and touch him.
i didn’t get to see many of the other houses on Washington Terrace from the inside. Farther down the road lived two boys whom we sometimes played with at their house; they had a basement with a pool table, and in the yard a swimming pool we never used. And then there was the neighbor’s daughter, Tiffany, who was the same age as my youngest siblings and whom they all played with, a pale girl whose hair was so fine and blond that she could have been from Denmark. I never went into Tiffany’s house; I preferred to pass my time on the street, beneath the treetops, scraping bark from a dry stick or hopping back and forth on the sidewalk with Carissa and Jessica. The little ones trudged their bicycles down the middle of the street, Tiffany riding a tricycle just like Eugene’s.
Then someone would shout: Let’s go to the Cookie Lady! and everyone shouted: Yeah! and the group would work its way toward the cream-colored castle where the Cookie Lady lived. She was younger than her name suggested, the same age as my siblings’ mother, sometimes she seemed tired. The last time we’d rang her doorbell was one day earlier, we knew that what we were doing was awfully close to begging, and we tried to ration our trips a little to avoid wearing out the woman. Especially my sister and I were too old, so we hung back and let the little ones ring the bell, shrugging our shoulders apologetically and rolling our eyes, what can y
ou do? As soon as the Cookie Lady saw that it was us, she disappeared inside the house, and I peered through the screen door to see whether the walls were made of rubber here too, or whether the stairs wound in an endless loop, but all I could see was the outline of a large, ordinary house, and then the Cookie Lady reemerged in the doorway with a handful of caramels packed in colored cellophane and placed one in each of our outstretched hands.
◊
I haven’t been completely honest when writing about my father’s house as if there were only one. In reality there were two, which in my dreams and in my memory have melted into one, and perhaps this dreamlike monstrosity is the one that has appeared on paper.
Both houses stood on Washington Terrace, the first at number 25 and the second at the neighboring house, number 23. The first wasn’t sand-colored, but red. The sand-colored house which the family later moved into actually belonged to Tiffany and her parents and their newborn son, Tiffany’s little brother.
They’d been renovating the house, the kitchen was more or less a construction site, the back door was open, and someone entered and picked up a hammer from the floor, and beat Tiffany and her mother to death.
The fact that the father was right upstairs with the baby and didn’t hear a thing says quite a lot about the house’s size.
For some reason I always thought of the murder as an ax murder, not a hammer murder. The detective who interrogated my father and his wife, a man my father’s age, told them that he’d never seen such a brutal crime. He was old school, one of those kinds you only see in black-and-white Hollywood films in a trench coat, with a high personal ethos and a look of irreversible disappointment.
I know this because when I tried to find out when the family moved into Tiffany’s house, to get the exact date of the hammer murder, I stumbled upon a short film clip of the policeman. Father Homicide, they call him; he’s retired now, and his face truly looks as if it bears the burden of every murder he could not solve, not only the hammer murder but also another murder that occurred a few years later in the same neighborhood.
I’ve always thought that the murder of Tiffany and her mother happened during one of the dark intervals between my visits. One summer I left the house at number 25, and the next they’d moved over into the other. But as I google around, I realize that the date of the murder, July 31, 1983, corresponds with one of my visits.
Among the letters I sent to my mother is one from the very same day. It was a weekday, a Thursday, we’d been to school, so I must have written the letter close to six o’clock that evening, when Tiffany and her mother were killed in the neighbor’s house. The short letter details how we’d spent the school day at a roller-skating rink. In the same envelope is a letter from my dad to my mom in which he thanks her for letting me stay with them all summer. He writes that it would be faster for me to deliver the letter in person. In a few days he’ll accompany me to New York City and put me on a plane home to Copenhagen. He also writes that Gussie is with us, and that she’d just taken us kids to McDonald’s.
The letter wasn’t written in his university office but in his home office, a large room on the second floor they called the sunroom, whose pale-yellow decor reminded me of buttermilk, in the very corner of the house that faced number 23.
When I write him and ask, he tells me that he’d been organizing various things in his office, catching up on various correspondence, including the letter he wrote to my mother. If he’d glanced up from the typewriter, he might have seen the hammer murderer on his way into the house, he says. But no one heard or saw anything, and neither did he.
•
The murder was headline news for quite some time, and it turned into a huge media circus. As the neighbor of the victims, my dad’s wife spoke to the tv news. The story fascinated the public. It had all the ingredients: the young couple, the little girl, the grand mansions. On the private street behind the historic gate building depicted on postcards, people didn’t feel safe after all. The father that had been upstairs with the little boy; the hatred, the brutality, and the meaninglessness that the whole thing demonstrated. My dad says that, at one point, they even suspected the father himself, but they never caught the murderer. Everyone was left to conjecture about what had happened. Maybe it was one of the Black construction workers who was remodeling one of the other houses? A young man in his twenties who had worked for the residents of number 27 was a suspect. Some said drugs might’ve played a role. A few months after the murder, the young man was arrested when he’d raped a maid at a hotel in southern Missouri, and he was brought back to St. Louis to be interrogated for the murder in number 23, but the police couldn’t find any corroborating evidence.
In the end people thought a drifter, a vagabond, had committed the crime. That theory satisfied people. Apparently, you were supposed to believe that vagabonds were prone to wander into houses, grab random tools, and pummel the occupants to death before vanishing into thin air. For many years, no one really felt safe on the street.
After all the media attention, it was hard for Tiffany’s father to sell the house. Many curiosity-seekers appeared. The fact that the infamous hammer murders had happened here put a damper on homebuyers’ interest in the house.
My dad’s wife thought it was a shame to let such an opportunity go to waste, such a lovely house, larger, prettier, and more architecturally interesting than their own. And now it was financially within reach, a house they could not otherwise afford. After it had been on the market for some time, they purchased it from the neighbor at a bargain rate. I don’t know who finished the kitchen, whether it was Tiffany’s father or my siblings’ mother. But when I visited them the following summer, they’d moved into their neighbor’s house, and their old house was for sale.
in 2006 i was back in the house. The entire autumn I lived in a hotel in Iowa City, a four hours’ drive north of St. Louis, as part of a group of international writers. One warm October day, I drove down with my boyfriend, who was visiting from Denmark. He’d met my dad, but not the rest of the family.
My family is a little out of the ordinary, I warned him.
Most families are, he said, and we drove south in a rental car and checked into a room at the hotel with the stuffed bear in the lobby. It was supposed to seem ferocious, I think, but it appeared as though the taxidermist had captured it at the very moment it yawned; it was standing beside the stairwell on its hindlegs, holding a bowl out to guests with a sad expression in its eyes.
Except for Jessica, who had gotten married and moved to Los Angeles, all of my siblings lived around St. Louis, my brother and Carissa in their mother’s properties and Sabrina in a house with her husband and their newborn son. My dad had arranged for the entire family to meet for brunch at the museum restaurant in the park. That is, the entire family except his wife, my dad believed it was easier if it appeared to be spontaneous, and if she didn’t know we were coming.
One by one my siblings arrived. The table he’d reserved was round, and I jumped to the chair next to Carissa. Do you remember when we raced around in the Lotus right outside? I said after I’d sat down, a little short of breath. When we were pulled over by a park officer? I tried to mimic the park officer’s facial expression when he saw us in the car. Her response was curt: Yes, I remember. Her hair hung down her eyes, I kept trying to get her attention. The others were fussing over Sabrina’s baby, whose eyes reminded me of a koala’s. Eugene, Sabrina, and her husband passed him around between them. My sister was preoccupied with this and said something to Eugene about the boy. Where do you live now? I asked her. Down by The Loop, she replied, without turning her head.
I thought The Loop, a short stretch of cafes and cozy shops, was the most exciting place in St. Louis, and I told her so.
I’m sure it can’t compare with a house in Copenhagen, she said. But in fact she knew Copenhagen; it had been almost five years since she’d visited me, or maybe six? I scavenged my memory to calculate, but I couldn’t say exactly when her letters, an
d since then, her emails, had ceased. More and more time passed between her responses, and at some point they simply stopped. Rather like now. Regardless what I asked her, she didn’t really reply. She sat on the chair beside me, and I could hardly hear what she said.
When we were finished eating, someone said: Let’s go to the house, and we drove toward Washington Terrace in four cars. No doubt because my boyfriend was with us, my dad used the front door. It was the first time I’d entered the house that way, just inside the door, the peacock mosaic met us shining a violet fan on the wooden floor. It was like breaking into a stranger’s house.
We found her on the backstairs, his wife, sorting clothes into colored plastic tubs that lined each step. She was startled to see us, we filled the entire passageway, an eight-person crew watching her sort clothes. Suddenly the house seemed smaller. She yelled at my dad. Why didn’t I hear about this? It was a good question, I’d wondered the same thing—why wasn’t she at brunch?—and we could all hear how unconvincing his response was.
When that was over we went into the solarium. We sat at a round table in the corner, in a three-quarter circle like at an amphitheater, his wife in the middle. As soon as we’d sat down, the incident on the stairwell was forgotten, and she was in a better mood. Mostly she talked to me, even after all these years I was still the witness, the anchor of conversation, her audience, or maybe it was my boyfriend, who was new to the group and who was sitting beside me and didn’t remove his backpack for a long time.
They didn’t offer us anything to eat or drink.
She said: Sabrina turned out to be the most boring of them all.
Sabrina and her husband sat right beside her, I glanced their way, but both were unfazed. After several hours of this, without anyone really interrupting her, she said: Let’s öpen a bottle of champagne! We should celebrate that Mathilde is here!
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