by Rick Moody
Elena held Wendy’s doll body close, and then, reciting incantations known only to mothers, she unhooked the garter belt, the way some teenaged smoothy could undo a complicated support bra backwards in the dark. She fastened up Wendy’s pants and set the crusty garment aside.
—Are you sure? Benjamin said. What about tetanus? Shouldn’t we …
—Wendy, Elena said. What did you use to do this?
Wendy mumbled:
—Wilkinson double-bonded …
—A new one? A new blade?
Wendy nodded.
—Take better care of those things, Elena said to her husband. Lock them away. And where did you get that … that lingerie?
—Williamses’, Wendy said.
She sank to the floor, wilted, and her two parents sat down with her, on the damp, fungal carpet. The garter belt lay aside like some strangely essential family gear. Elena knew all about the rococo ornamentation of grief and so she didn’t try to comfort Wendy. Not right away. No hug was going to do the trick now. But Benjamin tried the laying on of hands. Where he had been penurious as a dad before, he suddenly recognized necessity. He wrapped his arms around his daughter. And Elena wasn’t impervious to the sight of it. She wasn’t impervious to the way embraces were a sort of cardiology. So Wendy lay in her father’s arms, asking what happened, what happened to Mike, where was he now, refusing, so far, to be the bearer of his memory. Refusing, therefore, to let him journey away. All these losses were sutured up in Wendy now, like when she and Paul found Benjamin’s father in the basement one weekend, when they heard his oddly practical voice calling out to them, I’ve lost the use of my legs. That stroke weekend. Like when Elena’s father had died in the spring. All Wendy’s losses were one. And so were Elena’s, and Benjamin’s, and Janey’s, and Jim’s, and …
—Darling, Elena said. Did Paul happen to call last night?
Between hyperventilating gasps:
—Said he was going to take the last train.
—Trains won’t be running, Benjamin mumbled. Can’t be.
—Maybe we should drive out to the station anyway, Elena said. Let’s just go take a look.
—You don’t think you should stay here? With her? What if they.… What if the telephones start working? I could go …
—No, I’d rather.… If there’s going to be any trouble. I’d rather.
And then Elena smiled:
—It’s got a heater, too. The car.
—Would that be okay? Ben said to Wendy, quietly. Do you think you could come with your mother and me while we drive down there? I’d rather you came with us, sweetheart.
It was almost noon when Benjamin got back with the Firebird. They packed Wendy in, her wrists sleeved in a Handi Wipes, that rag from the convenient plastic container. She had a glass of Tang with her. And a space blanket. The dog was huddled in the back seat. Up against her.
The temperature had dipped again. The unrestrained sun of the morning was gone. They headed down past the Silvermine Arts Guild and the Silvermine Tavern, where a cereal commercial had recently been filmed, and in doing so, they traveled across the latitudes of ancestral New Canaan. Here John Gruelle had first drawn his famous Raggedy Ann; landscape artist D. Putnam Bradley had painted his sweet pastorals; here Hamilton Hamilton had pen-and-inked, and Childe Hassam had gallicized a little verdant scene. Among writers Padraic Colum, Irish-born poet and folklorist, and Robert Flaherty, Arctic explorer, lived here, and William Rose Benét and Maxwell E. Perkins. Perkins, maybe, while editing Look Homeward, Angel: “We had a grand winter at New Canaan. Skating on most of the week-ends and hockey, and over New Year’s, for three windless days, the whole three-mile lake, a sheet of flexible black ice.”
Over this history they drove, over decomposing Canaan Parish. Before long the Hoods would move. Half of the family would move and the other remain. Maybe in the years that followed, they would spend their weekends, like the Williamses, arranging the complexities of visitation. Benjamin Hood would drop his daughter off or find his daughter waiting in the driveway of her mother’s house, in Wilton or Westport or East Haven or Darien. He would see his wife through the rustle of drapery. Benjamin Hood would leave his daughter alone for the afternoon at R-rated films, or he would go with her, exhausted, to the Red Coach Grill or McDonaldland. And Elena would be doing a telemarketing job offering subscriptions to Club, or she would have a photocopying job, and she would be secretly dating. Like Benjamin. But they wouldn’t be dating the Williamses.
At the train station in New Canaan, that little end-of-the-line train station, they were told that the 11:10 had never made it to Stamford. It had been disabled somewhere around Greenwich.
The three Hoods crowded around the ticket window. Three blossoms on a thorny stem. They barked questions.
—Good news is, said the man at the window, they restored the power not long ago. On the New Haven line. The trains are running now. Probably your boy is in Stamford right now. Catching a taxi.
—If he has any money, Benjamin said.
The two men tried to force a laugh.
So they set off for Stamford, driving slowly. In the midst of all this personal trouble, what did a little history matter? What difference did snapshots make, or bronzed shoes? Who cared about those plastic cubes full of snapshots? History was cheap trophies and misspelled school newspapers, and it was also the end of town meetings in 1969, and it was also the guy in New Canaan who remained a voluntary slave for years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and it was the driving off of the Sagamores in the seventeenth century, and the pristine quiet of the region before the first English settlers. History’s surveillance was subtle and enduring and its circular shape caught the Hoods, the Nixons, and everyone else. You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.
Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe. Next month: the end of the Fantastic Four. The Fab Four. The Fetishistic Four. Family was all tricks with mirrors. Flimflam. Back through the generations, back forefathers and forefathers and forefathers, it was a mantle he didn’t think he could hold up. All flummery. Paul Hood, the flame, the torch, burnt out. Burnt at both ends. He wished he could forget them, wished he could put this trip behind him, wished he was still eating with a bib, making models of stock cars, four on the floor, wished he was back in the arms of some girl. Missed Libbets. On the platform in Stamford. He wanted to run, to flee fathers, forefathers, fornification, femmes fatales, and all that stuff. He wanted to flee friends.
The night had been really, really long. Hours scribbling pictures on a scrap of newspaper he had found under the seat, hours frigid in the dark, really long that night, so long that he was starting to believe the dumb lies he’d told. Starting to believe dumb, little stories about his family. Believing in familiar comforts. Scribbling pictures and writing crumbling sentences. Free-verse trash and quotations from Thick as a Brick. Practically hallucinating. He actually believed his family would be waiting for him when he got in. They would be waiting there—while the rapist on the train hotfooted it back to his leopard skin-blanketed, water-bedded crash pad—and they would be terribly concerned and they would hug him and they would think up new nicknames for him and they would drive him directly to the largest possible bowl of shrimp cocktail.
Nah, it wasn’t like that. Family values. The Carpenters were family values. And Nixon making Elvis an honorary drug enforcement agent. Family kept the doors open for alcoholism and incest and battery and ignorance; it ensured the passage of racist bullshit and bigotry from one generation to the next. His parents were gene-splicers, genetic engineers, implanting him with the same grim diseases they had suffered. He was a flash fire waiting to happen. He was fucked up and frie
ndless and his chances were about fifty-fifty.
So the train had started moving again sometime around dawn, inching along at a speed no quicker than footsteps. Messing with Paul’s unsteady pictures, with the stories he was making up, stories in which he hadn’t done all the stupid things he had done in the last twenty-four hours. The train had been reduced to some prior kind of train, a steam engine bearing them through cow country. They arrived in Stamford early in the morning and all these people, all these other losers, asked Paul if he needed a ride, if anyone was going to meet him. All these people talking to him. All this kindness. But he said, no no no, not to worry, and he had been dragging his ass around the train station ever since. He had fought some babyish response to all this, he had pasted a smile on his mouth—yeah, my parents are coming for me. Asked a cabbie if this money, these last few crumpled bills—were enough to take him to New Canaan? Yep, the money was enough, but the roads were impassable. Have to wait till they cleared them off.
Anyway, Paul knew about these long waits. His mother was always late. He wasn’t surprised to be reduced to this. He would start walking soon, except that he wouldn’t walk home, he would walk back to school. He would walk until he could hitch and then he wouldn’t stop until he was way up in the North. He wouldn’t stop until he was so far north there were no deciduous trees, until granite bubbled up underneath every lawn. Glacier country.
He moved from the old waiting room with its congregation of bad-luck types, back out onto the platform, up and down the platform, kicked some newspaper vending machines, hoping for spare change. He paid ten cents to get into the pay toilet and washed his face. Back to the waiting room. Back out onto the platform.
He knew that he wouldn’t come to a bad end, though, because he knew how comic books ended. They never ended. Comic books never ended. There was always more character development. Always another wrinkle in what had seemed to be unchanging and permanent. Every time the Thing left the F.F. he came back. His pain and rage receded and he was bantering jocosely with Stretcho and Sue and Johnny. He was back. Nobody ever died, at least not forever, and nobody ever disappeared, no quarrel was devastating, no closure was entire. The good moments, when the light outside was just right and everybody agreed—these moments came back again and again. Franklin would be resuscitated. Sue would take Reed back. And Dr. Doom, whose ashes had been scattered in sub-space, would menace them again. He’d impersonate their landlord or their accountant or something.
So, after spending an hour stripping the emblems off of expensive cars in front of the train station, Paul Hood wasn’t surprised to see his family’s red Firebird ease into the parking lot. The Firebird. His face flushed. His heart was stuck up in him somewhere where he couldn’t ignore it. He had a heart. When his mother got out of the car, he remembered that time—when he was a kid—when they had gone away for a week and left him and Wendy with a battle-ax whose only defense for her cooking was that her husband, rest in peace, had had no sense of smell. Paul saw his mom and he remembered when they had finally come home, when Daisy Chain wouldn’t shut up for half an hour barking and climbing all over the furniture. For a couple of hours everyone had been laughing.
His dad climbed out of the car, and Wendy pushed forward the bucket seats, with the dog slobbering behind her, and they were all standing out there smiling these strange half-smiles. His family. His mom was his mom and his dad was his dad and he was stuck with that, whatever became of them. Like Darien was stuck with the Long Island Sound, like the Cambodians were stuck with the Mekong, like Concord was stuck with the Merrimack. It was better than spending the rest of your life on Conrail. Home was where they had to take you in. Language was for praising home, for praising home and God and rivers. God and language and rivers and home were elastic. Everything stretched around the surface of family.
But these weren’t smiles, really. His family wasn’t smiling. Smiles were cheap jewelry. They were looking down, his family, scuffing the snow and ice in the parking lot. It wasn’t as good as all that. It wasn’t a romance. It was enough that he dropped the emblems. Just unloaded those elaborate bits of chromium right on the cracked pavement there. He threw his arms around his puffy dad. And then he threw his arms around his icy mom. Kissed Wendy. Kissed the dog.
—Well, we are glad you are okay, his father said. How long have you been here?
Paul just threw up his hands.
—Have a lot to tell you, Benjamin said.
Everyone tried to laugh.
—And it’s not all good.
It was all quiet again. They buckled themselves into the car, heat on high, as if they had all been deprived of heat lifelong. Daisy Chain scrambled over Wendy’s back to get his humid dog tongue all up in Paul’s face.
Then Paul’s dad just put his head down on the steering wheel and sat that way for a while. This went on for a long time. And then he started to choke or something. Paul had never heard anything like it. He thought it might be a joke. Or a medical emergency. He didn’t know what to do. His mom’s gloved hand wavered in the air at his father’s back as though she were going to set it there. She didn’t. His father turned back to look at him, to look at Wendy, smiling, not saying anything, his cheeks shiny with some dew.
—Something I have to tell you two, he said.
And right then there was a sign in the sky. An actual sign in the sky. The conversation stopped and there was a sign in the sky and it knotted together everything in that twenty-four hours. Above the parking lot. A flaming figure four. And it wasn’t only above the parking lot. They saw it all over the country, over the Unitarian Church of Stamford, over New Canaan High School, over the Port Chester train station and up and down the New Haven line, over emergency vehicles in Greenwich and Norwalk, over the little office where Wesley Myers was trying to write the next day’s sermon, for the first Sunday in Advent. In halls devoted to public service, in private mansions and dilapidated apartments. The heavens declared: the flaming figure four.
They saw it from the Firebird. They did, and it stayed with them all that fall, that apotheosis.
Or that’s how I remember it, anyway. Me. Paul. The gab. That’s what I remember. And this story really ends right at that spot. I have to leave Benjamin there with that news, with a wish for reconciliation that he will bury in himself; I have to leave Elena, my mom, whom I have never really understood; I have to leave Wendy, uncertain, with one arm around the dog, and I have to leave myself—Paul—on the cusp of my adulthood, at the end of that annus mirabilis where comic books were indistinguishable from the truth, at the beginning of my confessions. I have to leave him and his family there because after all this time, after twenty years, it’s time I left.
Finis.
About the Author
Rick Moody (b. 1961) is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, he graduated from Brown University and earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from Columbia University. His first novel, Garden State, won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award, and his memoir of his struggles with alcoholism and depression, The Black Veil, was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir. His 1994 bestseller, The Ice Storm, was adapted into a film starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Moody’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Details, and the New York Times. His work has also been selected for the Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His story “The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven” won the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize. Moody currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at New York University.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or ar
e used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
I need also to acknowledge some people and institutions who have made the composition of this book possible: Fishers Island Colony, Yaddo, MacDowell, Michael Pietsch, Melanie Jackson, the Count de Cenci, D.A., Helen Schulman, Dan Barden, John Crutcher, N.B.W., Shrug, Jack Moody, Angela Carter, and especially Jules.
Copyright © 1994 by Rick Moody
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2767-0
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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