Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “He was one of the four great presidents. He tried.”

  “Oh God and also in the end didn’t he turn into a vegetable and his wife was discovered to be running everything? I hate these associations.”

  “Well, I can’t help it. I think it was one of the first big Technicolor movies. That can’t be right. I think it wasn’t a recent movie when I saw it. We saw it for social studies. Well. Sorry I brought it up.”

  “I’m glad to know about this. And I have to report that I haven’t thought of anything other than your supernal beauty that originally knocked me out about you. I’m still trying. Something will come.”

  “I don’t want to hear about my beauty as an explanation for everything.” She spoke seriously, but was half smiling.

  “I know, I know. You forgot to say my supposed beauty, the way you usually do, by the way. Okay, no more.”

  “You know we have this difficulty,” she said, still smiling.

  “We do. I look like a movie star and you don’t and never did. Okay. That’s all on this subject. I’m sorry.”

  They sighed heavily in unison, and with the same impulse, they joined in pulling the sheet up to their shoulders.

  Ray began again. “We were living in North Oakland and my father wanted to move the family to Piedmont so he could be nearer his store. Where we were was still very white middle class but the writing was on the wall. Blacks were well established on the east side of East Fourteenth Street by then and a certain amount of panic selling was under way in the better neighborhoods. Probably he was just being prudent in wanting to move, but there was a problem. My mother was tepid to lukewarm about moving but Rex was absolutely determined against it, so when she saw how upset the idea made Rex she turned against it in solidarity with him, still wishywashily, though. My position was that I was happy to move.

  “Our house on Kingsland was really a peach. A building contractor had built it for himself, so it was only the best. It was a big mock Tudor, parquet hardwood floors upstairs and downstairs, hilltop site. The house was on a very sizable triangular lot surrounded by a retaining wall. This was late fifties. Rex was in junior high and I was in high school. The house sat up very high and you looked east at Skyline Drive and then the hills that hadn’t been built on yet. There was a lot of open space in reach and a few vacant lots right in the neighborhood where kids could build forts and play nasty if they so chose.”

  “What about friends, did you both have friends around there?”

  “Rex did. My social life was based around school by that time. But yes, in fact he had a particular friend, as it developed. His friend Michael. He did not want to leave Michael behind.

  “So there we were. Now let me see if I can remember exactly how this got started …

  “We each had our own room, did I mention that? We were opposite each other on the second floor. My room you could walk into anytime. Rex was totally secretive and kept his room locked. He started out only keeping it locked when he was in it, and that was accepted. And then he had to have the right to keep it locked when he wasn’t in it and my mother would have to petition him to go in there for any reason. There was a battle royal before that was agreed to and he had to agree to let her look in from time to time, escorted by him, to see that he was keeping his room in order, before it was settled. But he got his way. Naturally I thought he was being ridiculous, but I was probably annoyed at the perquisites he was working out for himself that I was forbidden to have, just because of the way things had come about. I was hardly going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me copying his demands. I was the older one, after all.

  “His secrecy annoyed me.

  “I’m not sure of the exact order these next two items occurred in. First I should say that we were excessively frugal as a family, or we were supposed to be. My mother was the enforcer. Don’t use too much soap when you do the dishes … return the milk carton to the refrigerator immediately after you pour your milk … and so on. We got screamed at if we left the milk on the counter for ten seconds or if we drank our milk before we put the carton back. Always do that first. Don’t ruin things. Someone set a pot from the stove down on some new Formica and it left a semicircular scorch mark. She would have little seizures of agony every time she looked at it, for years. No one ever admitted doing it. In any case. Two things happened in some order or other. I was accused by my mother of using too much heavy duty aluminum foil when I wrapped leftovers up to store in the refrigerator. We were really kitchen slaves. I got good at it, or rather I got fast at it, so I could get out of there. She had just opened a new box of this foil and she discovered that some untoward amount of it was gone, so since I was the one who put things away most of the time I must be the guilty party. I said I was innocent, but no, I was slapdash, I rushed through things, I was guilty. I had to be. Now shortly after this, something strange was going on in Rex’s room. I was hearing sounds of strange typing. Very slow typing, you know, hunt and peck. Late at night, this was. And the typing had a banging quality, tinny.

  “I figured there had to be a connection between the typing and the missing foil. I decided to find out what Rex was up to, and, to make a long story short, I went up on the roof when he was away and hung over the edge so I could look in his window, albeit upside down, and see what there was to see. And this was what he was doing. We had this old Remington that he’d appropriated and he had set the thing to stencil mode and he was typing out some imperishable text, obviously that was the point, on some of the aluminum foil he’d pinched. I couldn’t read it. But I did notice one other thing before my head filled up with blood, and that was a long, metal, screwtop canister photographers use, I guess about eighteen inches long. It was on his bed. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I knew it went with the imperishable text and that he was making a time capsule.

  “So I was in possession of an interesting piece of information. What did I do with it?

  “In my defense, remember that I was ticked off over the missing aluminum foil business.

  “I decided I had to know what the subject of his document was.

  “I couldn’t get into his room. Also I was bound by a certain protocol toward him that he had bullied the family into generating. I was never to touch him. Never ever to lay a hand on him for any reason. There had been some physical conflict between us, provoked by him, and of course I was in the wrong, being the older and bigger and wiser party, so we had all agreed I was never to touch him. Of course in a less well-regulated family I could have taken him by the throat and made him tell me what he was doing.”

  Iris said, “You mean you were so certain that what he was doing was injurious to you or so nefarious in some way that you had to find out what it was. You couldn’t just let him go on with it, do whatever he was going to do with it, and forget about it. You couldn’t.”

  “I don’t know why I couldn’t. I was convinced it was threatening.”

  “This is vintage you. You become immovable. You’re still like that when you’re convinced for no reason that you’re right. The other night when I nudged you when you were snoring and …”

  “I wasn’t, though.”

  “May I finish? You were. You woke me up with it. I nudged you and you woke up furious and denied it and said … are you still denying this? I was under the impression you’d dropped this absurd … I can only call it a canard and I’m getting furious by the way all over again if this is still your position, that I had dreamed you were snoring? You meant it. You don’t take it back, right?”

  “Iris, you won’t like to hear this but it is logically possible it happened that way. It is something that has happened before in human history, a person dreaming another person snored. Also the period when I was snoring is over with.”

  “Oh, good point.”

  “Look, you agree I ended that period of snoring.”

  “Well, until then, you had. But all right, you ridiculous person.”

  “I’m losing the thread. Okay. Lalala. Okay, so I had to
find out what in hell this thing he was creating was.

  “First I asked him. I wouldn’t say I menaced him, but I caught him on the stairs and blocked his way down. I was going to make him tell me. He got enraged. I didn’t tell him I’d actually peered into his room. I said I’d figured it out purely by the sounds coming from his room that he was typing something unusual and that he’d better tell me. Something for school, he said. I told him he was lying when he couldn’t say what, exactly, his school project was. It got extremely tense.

  “He was murderous but he was in a forked stick because I wasn’t touching him and because he obviously didn’t want my mother drawn into this, if he could avoid it. Then I pretended to lose interest. I acted disgusted and made as if to get out of there, leave him alone. He shot upstairs to his room then, clearly with the idea of securing his time capsule and keeping it out of my hands by any means necessary. He was clearly terrified I would get hold of it.

  “I spun around and as soon as I heard him get his door unlocked I shot up there with the idea of forcing my way in after him and seeing what I could see before he started screaming for help. I was in the grip of the moment. I don’t justify any of this. It was craziness.

  “I did it. I pushed my way in just as he was practically falling across the typewriter to protect it and at the same time rolling this sheet of text down so that I couldn’t read it. He began screaming immediately. But I saw the title, all in caps, on the handwritten draft he was working from, which was CRIMES BY THIS FAMILY OF FINCH, and then our address and the date.

  “Instantaneously my mother was there. It was clear I had violated the rules and was in his room against his wishes, so that was all she needed to know. I was ordered to go and sit in my father’s den until he got home. She wasn’t interested in any explanations from me. She liked to hit, I was afraid of her. She’d caught me in his room and that was sufficient. It was so stupid of her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as soon as I was in Coventry he was free to bury his time capsule and cover his tracks. He did exactly what I would have done. At first, later, he claimed he’d thrown everything out, down a storm drain, destroyed it, when my father got around to questioning him. Hours later. Then, I don’t know what it was, but he didn’t stick to that position. Maybe it was just some instinct of defiance he couldn’t control, but he said that in fact he’d buried the thing on the property, or hidden it on the property, rather. I think he implied he’d buried it. You understand that when my father came home and questioned me I told him everything.

  “And Rex was astounding. He realized how upset everyone was about it, but he was like a prisoner of war refusing to supply anything but his name, rank, and serial number. He would only confirm what we already knew. He acknowledged the title of the thing he’d written, but he refused to say what he meant by it and he refused to reveal what the document said. My mother was pathetic. She was trying to get him to say that it was a story he’d written. And that was the only other substantive thing he would say … that, no, everything was true that he’d written. It was all true.

  “I was pretty dumbfounded myself. I couldn’t really imagine what this document was about. I thought maybe it was primarily calumnies against me, coming out of our terrible sibling situation. Or maybe it was a compilation of all Rex’s grievances against everybody in the family. The situation was a Rorschach for everybody, I guess. Something about it drove my father particularly insane. I couldn’t figure out, I still can’t, if the original idea had been for Rex to privately express his paranoid feelings and then to bury them and then get rid of them that way, without intending any of it to come to the attention of anybody in the family … that is, perform a totally private therapeutic act in the form of a childish plot to get the satisfaction of somebody far in the future finding this account and thinking badly about the Finches, Rex excluded. I couldn’t fathom it.

  “It led to hell.

  “I could feel it developing into hell that first evening. My father was in some way deeply wounded and maddened by this thing happening. My mother was frightened. I was horrified at what I’d wrought by bringing the whole thing to light in the first place. And Rex was becoming more obdurate by the minute. He had been given a role that was perfect for him. He was somehow able to play it as a free speech matter and take the position that what he had done was his private business. I had broken into his room. We were the ones who were acting insane, was Rex’s message. I think he even seemed to get smaller, more compact. He was afraid of what kind of punishment he might get. But inside he was overjoyed, I know.

  “My father kept shouting out new scenarios of what Rex was damn well going to do and what was going to happen to him if he didn’t. He gave one deadline and then another deadline and so on. You have to look at it from his standpoint. Here he has an absolutely uncontrollable eleven- or twelve-year-old kid who has concocted some kind of slanderous document and secreted it someplace on the property. But he was also working himself up. There was something untoward about his intensity over this, and that got my mother and me more upset than we already were.

  “And you have to keep in mind the family culture that made this so exquisite. Supposedly we were very against violence. We were liberals. My father was ex–Ethical Culture. No guns for toys, for us. That kind of thing. Don’t hit back in school. Hitting was stupid—except for her, of course. Let the bullies demean themselves by hitting you. That reminded me of the only thing I could think of that might be in any way considered a crime of the Finches. There had been hysteria during the last year of the war when my father’s draft category came up, and I had an inkling that he’d done something not quite right through a friend to keep from getting called up. This is the Second World War I’m talking about. But Rex was too young to know anything about that, if there was anything to know. On the other hand Rex was kind of a snoop. Maybe he knew something I had no clue about. He was definitely a sort of a snoop. And he was precocious. So there we were. It ended when Rex produced a coughing fit. He’d been crying, of course. He was asthmatic. It was a complete impasse, and we were all exhausted so we just stopped talking to one another and ate cornflakes for dinner. Except my father. He didn’t eat.”

  Iris said, “You’re sweating. But please don’t blot yourself with the sheet. This story is very extreme. You’re upset.”

  “I am. Let me get a towel. I’m perspiring. Put on the airconditioning for a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

  Iris attended to the airconditioner. Ray went again into the bathroom.

  When they were back in bed, Ray said, “After all this time you still hold your palm over your shame when you walk around naked.”

  “Only sometimes.”

  “What governs when you do it versus when you don’t?”

  “Search me. But I think I know why I did it just now.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to hear the rest of this story and I think I didn’t want to distract you.”

  “But what about your breasts, which are twice as distracting?”

  “Well, if I covered up everything it would have ended up calling even more attention to the, um, ensemble. I guess. Besides I don’t know if my breasts are twice as distracting as my shame. My breasts are not what they were. On the other hand my whatnot is exactly what it was and it was always very good at distracting you. But I think the discussion we’re having right now is unwise, I mean, on this subject matter.”

  “It distinctly is. But your breasts are perfect. And that’s all I’ll say.”

  “Let’s be wise. We’re talking.”

  “Right.”

  He waited. “Well, notice something about this situation Rex created. It was another manifestation of his genius in arranging events that are basically indescribable. Like eating the crucifix. Suppose my father had wanted to talk to a child specialist of some kind. Was he supposed to say that the problem he was having was that his son had written a criminal history of the family and buried it somewhere on th
e grounds? Impossible.

  “So, dinner. We’re all emotionally ravaged. My father had been savage, emotionally. Not something any of us had ever seen. We all drag ourselves to bed, ostensibly. But a little while later I hear something and I go to my window and someone with a flashlight is out there—my father, digging. No, the digging was later. That first night he’d had the inspiration that Rex had pushed this canister into one of the drains set into our retaining wall. There were about twenty of these and he was out there probing them with a broomstick. It wasn’t a bad idea to check them. My father was out there for a long time. And no luck. It was the middle of the night.

  “No, the digging was later. We had a big lot and only the parts close to the house were really landscaped. There was a patio on one side, the lawn and fish pond were on the other. But the bulk of the lot was given over to ground cover, ice plant and some other creeper that gives you purple flowers in the summer and attracts hordes of bees. The digging was sad because my father felt he could only do it at night, when he wouldn’t be seen by the neighbors. He was afraid to do it during daylight. And people would have wondered. He had never done any part of the yard work. We did it, Rex and I, what there was. Lawn mowing.

  “And the digging was going on, of course, because Rex was still absolutely defiant. Rex knew this was going on in the middle of the night. How could he be so cruel? This went on for … at least a week. Maybe two weeks. My father sits down opposite Rex at breakfast, stares at him, tells him in a steely voice that today is the day Rex is going to tell him where the tube is. Then he changed it to saying Rex was, that day, going to bring the tube to him, and then it was leave the tube in his den … Rex was mute. He was mute a lot during this period.

  “Then it was the gamut of punishments you’d expect. Cutting off his allowance, no playing with Michael, stay in the house all weekend, like that. But Rex kept doing the things he always did to earn his allowance, like cleaning up in the kitchen. He was even extra sprightly about it. Then there were threats to send him away to boarding school, which were absolutely pointless because we all knew there was no money for it. The store in Piedmont was on a knife edge.