The folks had started out on the East Coast, and in twenty years’ searching for a healing climate had exhausted every spot up to the Mississippi. Each major illness announced a move. The pattern would have left De Kalb behind long ago, as soon as Dad was well enough to move. But Ailene had come and watched Lily pack, saying, “If only you weren’t leaving just now.” And then, “because Lily’s in school here,” they had bought the house. The white one, with the pitched roof. Can’t miss it. She had stayed for their sake, and they blamed the place on her. It was not her fault that the Hobsons were always in the middle of a “just now.” It occurred to her that they were once again in a “just now” just now.
But at that moment Lily could no longer consider Dad’s migration. She had arrived at the place she was after. A house: not white; no pitched roof. Alone among all structures in that insular, white-wood town, it partook of an exaltation of lacework, a swell of rotundas, a badinage of balustrades, bricks, ironwork, and bayed glass. She had come to the home of a Master Elwood, who, with a Master Glidden some hundred years before, had had the barbed inspiration and invented the wire. The three-story brick mansion, like all palatial monstrosities, had devolved upon the public, becoming that least historical, most unthreatening of status quo structures, a museum.
She moved past the servants’ quarters, outfitted with display cases of early wire prototypes, barb-stamping machines, and legal documents. She crossed to the carriage stables, peeking in on their restored surreys, coaches, and horse-drawn sleighs. The side windows of the big house, dimly lit by gas burners, revealed the inner allure of a music room, a library, and a parlor full of foot-high porcelain Limoges figures. Lily did not stop for any of these seductions. Her goal lay at the back of the property, on the outer edge of the now bare woods. Tucked away in the shadow of the estate was the first of two houses that Elwood had built his daughter. The second, a honeymoon mansion, stood downtown, now the lodge for one of those Animal Clubs where men get together to wear funny hats and tell dirty jokes over dinner. This first house, still on father’s property, had been built for the girl when she was only a child. Everything about it—doors, windows, alcoves, gingerbreading—had been painstakingly scaled to half-size.
The doll’s palace was lit, as Lily knew it would be; whoever took care of the property could not resist the look of a little house lit against the late-autumn woods. Night after night, the caretaker damned the expense and set the tableau. Lily kept out of the pool of light the little windows cast. Working her way behind the tiny two-decker, she lifted the back-door latch and crawled in. She barely fit in the diminutive rooms with their half-sized furniture. She sat down, monstrously filling the downstairs, crowding up against a table set for tea. She took up one hemi-demitasse, then tipped it over to see where it had been made. She had come to the only bearable place in town to think in secret. Now she found that she could think, and devastatingly clearly, but not about the topic she had come here to work out. Lily had come to the dollhouse to devise a plan, a course of action for helping her father. Now, filling three rooms with her giant body, she felt that he was not the one most in need of healing.
She had left open the door of the tiny house. Its frame cut a rectangular gash into the pitch-black woods. She looked into the shortened frame and, unable to slow her thoughts down, she began to spook herself. She felt the half-sized door would suddenly fill with a hideous, escaped night figure whispering, “I am here, and so are you.” Quickly, she filled her mind with her family’s birthdays, the color and make of the family car, the titles of popular tunes. She forced her eyes away from the door, now less afraid of a night visitor than of the frame opening onto nothing at all. “All daughters,” she said out loud to the half-scale tea party, “come to the same end.” Calming a little, she laughed at her frayed nerves. She hiked her skirt to the cold November night, and tried to remember the agenda. After long silence, she spoke again. “At least the one I saw did.”
4
Rachel, at her traditional Saturday morning crack of dawn, prepared breakfast while the others slept. Despite the events of the evening before, she remained vintage Rach, setting the breakfast table in grand George III style, mirroring both that monarch’s opulence and his senile dementia. Widened by two leaves, the family Formica looked the algorithm of elegance. She covered it with heavy linen and six full settings of the best bone china, a wedding present that hadn’t been out of the hutch for thirty years. Six plates, platelets, saucers, cups, and bowls: layout for a wedding or a wake.
She flanked each place with a contingent of mint silver which she chose for its baroque complexity, compiling an anthology so varied and arcane that the typical Hobson—raised on simple cutter, holder, and digger—could only guess at their functions and hope to make it through the meal by sticking to the standard rule of working from the outside in. She spent minutes folding napkins of the same heavy linen and embroidered trim, propping them up like boat prows at each place head. She filled six massive brandy snifters with incandescent orange juice. And in the center of each place setting, alone on the pristine bone china, sat the punchline to this expanse of porcelain and filigree: a showcased, solitary, red multivitamin.
A long setup for a short gag. But she delivered that elaborate parody deadpan. Rachel’s world view—although she would have called it that only in farce—was simple. As long as she was condemned to a culture that mandated magnets on the refrigerator, she would be a blessed saint of refrigerator magnets. She lived in a land where folks in thirty-second spots on national TV made love to their clothes because they’d been washed in the right sauce. So be it: she’d prewash and fabric-soften with the best of them.
She sang the praise of science, those white-coated fellows who tamed Premenstrual Syndrome by turning it into an acronym and rendered roughage a topic of polite party conversation. She wondered out loud in Laundromats how Granny ever ran her drier without anticling squares, and, getting no response from startled strangers, would add, “The static buildup back then must have been lethal.” She saved herself with simple silliness. All one could do against the ludicrous was love it.
In short, Rachel, stuck in an America trapped between William Cullen and Anita Bryant, between the twin possibilities of Dr. and Jimmy Doolittle, got along by out-outraging outrage. She never laughed at her own ironies, never gave away how much of the routine was earnest and how much joke. So long as the status approximated the quo, she knew that the only way to live in what was fast becoming a global pillage was to take cover and defer to the damage the other guy was doing to the place. She talked daily to her consumer products, believing that if she kept as much faith as a mustard seed in the dialogue, one day the mustard would, as advertised, say something back.
She styled herself as her older sister’s corrective. She shared none of Lily’s nostalgia for the lost-encounter culture, none of what she called the woman’s sense of tragic relief. Rach, in her slot, had followed Lily, putting in a tour at the local land-grant. But she quit after two semesters, exclaiming in mock horror, “They want you to know things when you get out of there.” She spoke of higher education in the tones reserved for the seven warning signals of cancer. For a year after dropping out, she wore a homemade button that read: THIS MIND INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Despite her goofball truancy, Dad had not disowned her, as he had threatened to do if any of the kids didn’t finish college. She never gave him the opportunity. Reviving a grade-school propensity for figures, she scored higher on the actuarial exams than most CPAs and was swept up by a megalithic, conglomerate numerics firm secretly run by the Trilateral Commission. Plunked down in a lake-front skyscraper in Chicago, she dealt all day in the mathematics of futures. She calculated to eight significant digits how likely an individual was to die over a given period of years. She never thought to apply the secret formula to her father.
Neither father nor employers approved of her method—a private, black-magical system of symbolic manipulation. But neither could fault
her, because the numbers kept coming out quickly and correctly. While she did not deal in scholarly math so much as in brute arithmetic, Rachel nevertheless met Dad’s long harped-on insistence that the kids somehow promote the world’s knowledge.
She had a knack for sliding past Dad’s morass. She got along famously with the man, far better than any of the other kids. He cut her no favors, but she evaded his caustic fire. She fought back with an artless “Quit being stupit,” or “Hey, you’re hurting me.” Her secret was that she was not her parts. Dad could no more fluster her than could hunger or distress. The first she distanced with “My stomach is ravenous,” the second with “My mind just felt something awful.” She was just along for the ride.
Rach got along with everybody who wasn’t certifiable and three quarters of those who were. She had as hilarious a time at the Farmers’ Market as she did on Rush Street. She alone of the kids did not look on De Kalb as the gulag: “Sure, it’s a little behind the times. But so’s Colonial Williamsburg, and people pay big bucks to visit there.” Nevertheless, she teased her folks, saying she would not do the hour drive out through the corn belt any more than she had to: “You guys are great fun, but after six or so round trips a year, the actuarial odds of being taken out of commission on the East-West Tollway by some boozer in a Mazda become absolutely unacceptable.”
She had driven out this weekend partly because of Eddie Jr.’s eighteenth birthday and partly to try to weasel Eddie Sr. out of his newest decline. She had a third motive, kept secret. She thought, everyone else being in and the holidays just a couple of months off, that she might coax the nuclear family into a few renditions of “The First Noel.” Not even the Hobson Tabernacle’s occasional polychords nor the crass contemporary incarnations of midwinter—magnet figures infiltrating the manger crèche—could kill in her an unrepentant addiction to Christmas-carol harmonies.
She put the finishing touches on her extravagant table-setting joke when Eddie Jr., the second one up, rolled in. In flannels, he looked untimely ripped from dreamland. He gravitated to the table and took in the profusion. He blinked, saying groggily, “Sorry. Must have wakened at the wrong stop.” Rach played nonchalant. He tried again. “Look at all this stuff. We having a garage sale?”
Eddie sat down and amused himself by chasing the little red pill around on his plate with his knife. Rachel maneuvered in front of him and yanked his face up by the chin. She narrowed her eyes and clenched her teeth until her head shook with full-scale muscle tremors. She hissed, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever, ever . . .” repeating the word with increasing savagery until Eddie at last backed down and laughed. She dusted her hands of him with one more wrist-arabesque, and went back to cracking eggs into a saucepan.
“So what’s for break,” Eddie asked. “Fast?”
Rachel jabbed her kitchen knife toward his posh table setting, indicating juice and vitamin. “What you see is what you get.”
Eddie resumed batting the tiny thiamine puck around his plate, knocking off delinquently when their mother came into the room. Ailene Hobson, née Kobceck, was dressed in a pale-yellow wrapper that in Our Miss Brooks’s era might have passed for a housecoat. She went to the stove and autonomically flicked on a gas halo. But Rach anticipated her.
“Café, madame?”
Mom took the proffered mug, surprised. “When did you learn how to make coffee?”
“Learn? What I know about java could fit on Juan Valdez’s green card.”
Her mother mumbled thanks and drifted aimlessly around the room. Coffee thus ready at hand, Ailene’s entire morning ritual dissolved. Dazed by her efficient daughter, Ailene lit a cigarette in the superfluous gas flame and left the flame burning for reassurance. Rachel had already been out to the store and back, snagging the breakfast groceries, now spread all over the counter. Seeing them, Ailene went to her purse, perpetually wedged between the refrigerator and a cutting board, and fished out a ten-dollar bill that she tried to give to her daughter. “Here,” she said. “To help defray the cost.” Rachel took the bill, rolled it up, and hung it out of her nostril. Her mother grabbed the money back, tsking her disgust. “Ish,” she said. “You don’t know where that’s been.”
“I can well imagine,” Rach said.
Rejected but not rebuffed, Ailene tried to give the money randomly to the nearest alternate child. But Eddie Jr. declared that he would hold out for a twenty or nothing at all. Mother stuffed the note back into her purse, ammunition for a later date. She idled for a moment, then began tearing the price labels off the newly purchased breakfast goods.
“What are you doing?” asked Rachel.
Ailene fluttered her hands. “I’m just removing the little . . .”
“Why?” Rachel demanded. Getting no answer, Rachel steered her mother by the shoulders, coffee mug in hand, to the place next to Eddie Jr. Ailene put on her facetious face of good behavior, sitting obediently as if she, after all the years of dishing it out, had become at the end the disciplined child.
Mom was an enigma to Eddie Jr., the force that kept the house together through a miscellany of arcane formulas such as, “One out, one in, and one on.” He had gone from the adoration of childhood to the polite bafflement of late teens without feeling the seam. But this morning he understood her nervous habits implicitly. “So how’s Pop?” he asked, recommencing vitamin field hockey after the brief delay of game.
He failed to ask the point blankly enough, and she looked up, brightening. “Except for his annual fall bronchitis, fine.” She had served too long as press secretary to unlock herself now, even to the man’s son. “He got up at about three this morning and went into the study. More dictation, I assume.”
Although Dad looked like a big-bellied Bob Hope with hair and without the nose, little Eddie could not help imagining him with Mussolini’s chin whenever the topic touched upon the man’s late-night habits. The Great Dictator. In Hobstown, at least, they got the trains to run on time.
Artie shuffled in silently, sliding into an empty place. He took in Rach’s rococo prank and smiled weakly. Then he plunked his vitamin into the juice glass, swirling the concoction vigorously. Only when he was sure the pill had dissolved did he sip the mixture. For the ten or so days following his first hearing that Dad had once more taken ill, Artie invariably found he could not swallow anything more substantial than creamed corn.
Ailene, still searching for something to do, upbraided him. “Arthur, you look like you slept in those clothes.”
“Well, Mom, there’s a good reason for that. Left my jammies in Chitown.”
“And go put something on your feet.”
“What do you mean ‘and,’ Mom? And no, Mom. I don’t want to just yet.”
“You’ll catch cold,” insisted Ailene.
“Are you suggesting that a pair of socks will provide an antiseptic layer between me and viruses? Why do the little suckers always go for the feet?”
“Because that’s all the farther they can reach,” explained Eddie. “The floor-dwelling viruses anyway. Now the wall kind can bail onto just about anyplace on your body. They ambush you from above. Then there’s the tree dwellers. They can only attach to wet hair.”
Mom was an easy substitute, especially when the boys ganged up. Artie silenced his brother by presenting him with a spiral bound book of multiple-choice questions, a preparation aid for yet another in an endless queue of exams that he had been taking, as he often put it, “since kingdom kong.” He sincerely and, he knew, naïvely believed that if he could just get over the next battery of tests, the next hurdle, he’d be in the clear. Eddie, also a seasoned veteran, made the obligatory round of Legal jokes about how Rachel was making torts for breakfast and began quizzing. After a few rounds of when-in-doubt-go-with-B, Artie broke off the review. He asked, “What’s up with Lil?” addressing the question to the cabinets under the sink.
“She’s . . .” Eddie Jr. replied, searching his memory for “asleep in the Deep” but forcing the ancient quantity into deeper and
deeper hiding. He settled instead for, “She’s still in the rack.”
Artie challenged his mother. “Pop was up and working when you went upstairs? And he stayed in one piece all night? No relapse?” Ailene simultaneously shook her head and nodded, master of the self-contradicting signal. “No vomiting?” Ailene made another no, gravely. “How about temperature? Not febrile?” On Mom’s third denial, Artie said, “I just don’t get it. He’s got more severe symptoms than ever and he’s coming out of them faster than ever.”
By way of explanation, Mom crumpled. The brave-soldier shoulders came forward and her voice collapsed. “Get him into a clinic, at least.” Her throat constricted as if she needed to spit. “He’ll talk to you, Artie. You can trap him.”
Artie made a sound like a stifled hiccup. The kids had been all over this the night before, and tacitly for many nights before that. Mom knew all the arguments, and each kid knew that she knew that they knew. The stink of mutual knowledge filled the kitchen, as fat and acrid as Rachel’s bacon grease. No one said a word. At last, the silence flushed her out.
“Or why don’t you go see a physician when you go back to Chicago, and tell him about your father, and see what he thinks?” Her voice returned to normal. Her suggestion might at first glance have passed for a realistic compromise.
Artie answered jocosely, more for his brother and sister than for Ailene. “Sure, Mom. ‘Doc, it’s like this. There’s this guy. Well, actually he’s my father, believe it or not. He’s having these hallucinations, only he doesn’t want to come talk to you himself, because he’s afraid you might think he’s bonkers.’ They’d put me away. I don’t need Bellevue, Ma; I’ve already got University of Chicago Law.”
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