Gerald's Party

by Robert Coover

  ‘What real thing?’

  ‘Hey! Look at the little birdie!’

  ‘Easy!’ grunted Fred as they lowered the turkey gingerly onto the hot plate, the others in the room beginning to press around the table. ‘Here, gimme that rag!’ he cried, snatching the sash from around my neck.

  ‘Wait!’

  ‘Back off now!’

  ‘Jesus, whoever lives here really opens up his pockets!’

  ‘You shoulda been here earlier, Gudrun – there was a curried shrimp dip you wouldn’t believe!’

  ‘Say,’ Zack Quagg whispered in my ear, nodding toward Alison’s husband in the doorway (‘But I heard him say he was going to do it,’ Janny Trainer was insisting with tears in her eyes, ‘right in her chest like that!’), ‘that bearded dude got any green?’

  ‘And mushroom turnovers!’

  ‘He does all right, I think.’

  ‘He’s so cute!’

  ‘Thanks, man – that’s what I wanted to hear.’

  ‘I’ll get a bowl for the stuffing,’ Bob said, taking his oven gloves off, and Janice Trainer, beside me, gasped in disbelief, clutching her bosom: ‘Oh no! You mean he sits right on their faces and—?!’ ‘And that blade you just honed!’ Fred called after him.

  ‘That’s right, you little dope,’ said Daffie sourly, blowing smoke. ‘And now you’ve driven him away with your nasty little rumors.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know!’

  ‘What? Has Dickie gone?’

  ‘He’s just leaving,’ said Dolph, wandering in (‘Is it … is it fun?’), a boozy smile on his face. He winked at Talbot, nodded back over his shoulder toward the hallway. ‘H’lo, Mark. Say, you’re on a real toot tonight, aren’t you?’

  ‘It can be felt,’ Hoo-Sin explained at Janny’s shoulder, ‘but it cannot be grasped.’

  ‘Yeah? Try telling Dolph that!’ groaned Kitty, slapping his hand away, as I took Mark’s. ‘Uncle Dolph’s got ants in his pants, Daddy.’

  ‘Hey, what’s Mavis doing down there on the floor?’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Regina declared, fluttering in from the living room, ‘you can bet it’s something dirty!’

  ‘It has no surface …’

  ‘Trouble with Dolph is, he starts at the bottom but never works his way up!’

  ‘Don’t put the act down, Vadge, the big lady’s got talent,’ admonished Zack Quagg, working his way away from the table with a thick slab of breast, just as Fats came waddling up behind Regina, crooning: ‘Ruh-gina! Won’t you be my Valentine-a!’ She grimaced and shrank away.

  ‘… No inside …’

  ‘Man, this turkey’s a fuckin’ flyer!’ Quagg had apparently dunked it in the mustard; it was running down his chin and dripping on his unitard. Regina pushed Fats’ hands away, glowering toward Hoo-Sin (‘Gee, it sounds nice,’ Janny was saying, and Hoo-Sin, smiling enigmatically, left her). ‘Did you get hold of Benedetto?’

  ‘He’s coming as soon as his show’s over,’ said Regina. Hoo-Sin now had Fats in a half-nelson. ‘Wait—! Have a heart!’ he gasped. ‘To have mercy on wolves is to be tyrannical toward sheep,’ Hoo-Sin replied, as though intoning Scripture. ‘He’ll be bringing some of the cast.’ Fats was in the air again.

  ‘Terrific! Hey, we got the goods – let’s frame a show here! Malcolm—?’

  I realized too late we should have gone the other way. We’d made it as far as the hall door, but were blocked there by incoming traffic. ‘Malcolm may be down in the dungeon, Zack – something’s on the boards down there …’ Mark pulled back so I took him up in my arms. ‘Is that little man a dorf, Daddy?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A real one?’ It was like having to go the wrong way in a train station at rush hour. ‘Lemme at that roast canary, boys! I gotta round out my saggin’ career!’ But there was no turning back either, people were pushing toward the table and away from it at the same time. Fred backed off, gingerly holding his neckbrace: they were tearing the bird apart in there with their bare hands, it was as though we hadn’t put anything out to eat all night.

  ‘Are real dorfs naughty?’

  It was the tall cop, Bob, limping through with the butcher knife, who finally opened up a gap we could slip through. He scowled angrily at us as he squeezed past, and, glancing up, I saw that Mark was sticking his tongue out at him. ‘Hey, Mark! That’s not nice!’

  ‘I don’t like him, Daddy. He pinched me.’

  ‘The policeman pinched you—?’

  ‘Whaddaya say, Mark?’ grinned Charley on his way in. ‘How’s yer ole rusty dusty?’

  ‘How’s your ole boo-boo, Unca Charley!’ Mark replied, giggling. Charley rolled his eyes and did a sad little flat-footed dance around us. ‘My ole boo-boo’s gone blooey!’ he declared mournfully. There were people piling up and down the basement stairs (‘Whoo! game, set and snatch!’ ‘Ha ha! you goin’ down again?’ ‘Yeah, man, one more time …’), but it was less crowded out here. ‘It’s bye-bye, boo-boo, Mark, ole buddy!’ Charley called. Mark laughed and jumped up and down in my arms as I carried him toward the stairs. My study door had been pulled to, but the toilet door was open, the darkroom light still on. It glowed from the inside like hell in a melodrama. ‘Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo!’ Quagg had used just such a scene in The Naughty Dollies’ Nightmare, when the wooden soldier sold his soul to the golliwog. ‘How’s your ole poo-poo, Unca Charley!’ Mark squealed.

  ‘That’s enough, Mark. You’re getting overexcited—’

  ‘Wait, Daddy!’

  ‘No, Uncle Charley’s gone now, it’s time—’

  ‘But Peedie!’ he wailed. ‘I want my Peedie!’

  ‘Ah.’ This was a different matter. In fact, if I wanted any peace, I had no choice. But the TV room was impossibly distant, I didn’t know if I had the strength to go all the way back through there again. I felt as though I’d crossed one border too many: I just wanted to book in somewhere. Sit back and use room service. What made me think we wanted to go traveling again? ‘Do you think you really need it, Mark? Maybe we should try to go to sleep once with – all right, all right, stop crying.’ He was heavy, or seemed so suddenly. I set him down. The front room looked empty but there was music playing. A dance tune, ‘Learning About Love’ – it sounded tinny and hollow. ‘Wait here, I’ll go get it.’

  But when I turned around, there was Cynthia holding the rabbit up, waving it like a flag. Mark ran to her, arms outstretched, and I followed. It even had its ears on again. ‘Thanks, you saved my life,’ I said.

  ‘His ears are all funny!’ Mark exclaimed. She’d pinned them on backward.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry – I guess I don’t know much about rabbits!’

  ‘He’s wearing them that way for the party,’ I suggested. ‘You know Peedie – anything for a laugh.’ I winked wearily and Cynthia smiled. There was a faint blush on her skin from the darkroom light. ‘We’ll fix them back tomorrow.’

  ‘Naughty Peedie!’ Mark scolded, giving the thing a thump. Then he hugged it close, pushing a finger up its hole, a thumb in his mouth.

  ‘You’re so good with children,’ Cynthia said.

  ‘Did you get into the TV room?’ Woody asked her, coming up from the cellar stairs as I was leading Mark away.

  ‘Yes. It was a disappointment.’ Someone behind us laughed at that: ‘It always is!’ Woody, I’d noticed, was still in his underwear, but his shorts were on backward now. His hair was mussed, his eyes dilated from the cellar dark. ‘They’re in there now watching slow-motion replays of the doctor’s wife.’

  ‘Mavis … ?’

  ‘… A story …’

  My grandmother used to tell me a story about a man who had to climb a staircase with a thousand steps to get to heaven. She’d start at the bottom and take them one by one, and I’d always fall asleep, of course, before the man reached the top. I remembered – would always remember – the terrible ordeal of that climb, as I struggled desperately to keep my eyes open to the end, and I still had dreams about it: poised halfway up an infinite staircase, my legs gone to le
ad. For a while I even supposed a thousand might be an infinite number, but I tried counting it in the daytime and found it only took me ten or fifteen minutes. In fact, as I learned on mountain holidays with my father, it’s not even that high a climb. Of course my grandmother always counted slower than I did, but that still didn’t explain why I always fell asleep halfway up and usually sooner. I thought it might be the sleepy rhythm of the counting itself, so to counteract it I tried to distract myself with puzzles and memories and silent stories of my own. This was even less successful than concentrating on the counting, and what was worse, I seemed to lose the stories and memories I used that way. It was as if they were getting sucked up into the counting and there erased. Not that I wouldn’t have sacrificed them willingly to reach the top, to be able to see what the man saw, but clearly they were not the route. It seemed that nothing was, and I even began to worry that there might be something wrong with me, something having to do with words I’d been learning about like ‘souls’ and ‘corruption’ and ‘predestination.’ I remembered startling my parents one day on a drive to my grandmother’s house by asking them what was original sin. ‘Not being able to read a roadmap,’ my mother said drily, and my father laughed and said: ‘Being born.’ Then one day I suddenly discovered my grandmother’s secret. It was simple. There was always a preamble to the climb, a story about who the man was or how he’d died – often she claimed it was a relative or someone who’d lived there in town – and then a more or less elaborate account of his travels through the next world before he finally reached the stairs. And of course my grandmother was tailoring the length of this prologue to my own apparent sleepiness and the lateness of the hour. So I laid a trap for her, curling up in a corner early as though exhausted, pretending to fall asleep on her shoulder as she put my pajamas on, yawning and dozing through her preliminary tale until she got the man to the bottom step, letting him climb the first dozen or so, so there’d be no turning back. During these first ponderous footfalls, as I lay there with my eyes closed, I felt a momentary rush of guilt for having done this to my grandmother, and I nearly chose to carry the deception right on into feigned sleep – or real sleep, it might have got mixed up. But curiosity got the best of me, I’d waited too long for this: before I even knew it, I was sitting bolt upright in bed, hugging my knees, my eyes wide open, watching her intently. She gave no sign that anything was different, proceeding resolutely, step by step, toward the top, as though this was the way she’d always told it – and how could I be sure she hadn’t? The first four hundred steps or so were excruciatingly difficult – I was partly right about the incantatory powers of the slow ascent, and in spite of all my preparations, they nearly did me in. I perked up a bit after that, animated by the challenge of getting at least halfway, but then faded again around seven hundred, even losing a number of steps altogether – or perhaps my grandmother, seeing my eyes cross and my head dip, skipped a few. As the man started up the last hundred steps, I felt a surge of excitement – suddenly it was the best story I’d ever heard and I was wide awake. At last! But, typically, I’d peaked too early. Fifty steps later I was sinking again, overwhelmed by a thick numbing stupor. I couldn’t believe it. What was the matter, I asked myself fiercely, didn’t I want to see it? Didn’t I want to know what it was like? I pinched myself, shook my head, bugged my eyes, tried to bob up and down in the bed, but I couldn’t shake it off. Each step the man took fell like lead in my brain. It was as though my whole body had turned against me, refusing me at the last moment all I’d struggled for. I couldn’t see my grandmother, just the steps, looming high above me. The numbers tolled hollowly in the back of my head like heavy bells. It was my first true test of will, if there is such a thing, and as the man climbed the last steps up through the clouds, I must have looked a bit like him – largely lifeless, staring rigidly, teeth bared, grimly hanging in. Amazingly, we both made it. When he pulled himself up that final step, I was paralyzed with fatigue and anxiety, but I was at least able to see my grandmother again. ‘And what do you think he found?’ she asked. Her expression was the same as when she’d begun. ‘What?’ I responded hoarsely, almost afraid. ‘You tell me,’ she said. I thought it might be a riddle, a final test, or her way of helping me wake up enough to hear the end. ‘Angels,’ I said. The back of my neck ached from trying to hold my head up. ‘And lots of toys and candy and things.’ This didn’t seem serious enough. I was trying to remember things I’d read or been told. ‘God – and his own father and mother. And grandmother.’ ‘Yes …’ She seemed to want something more. I sank back on the pillow, trying to think. ‘Streets made of gold. Flowers that taste good, and … and happiness …’ ‘That’s right.’ I hesitated. My tongue was sore where I’d been biting. And my eyes, which hurt from holding them open, wouldn’t close now. ‘Is that … is that all?’ She tucked me in and gave me a kiss. ‘He found everything he wanted,’ she said and left me. It was a terrible disappointment. I stayed awake for hours thinking about it and it made my head ache for days after. I couldn’t quite think what it was, but I felt I’d lost something valuable – the story for one thing, of course: that special bond, while it remained unfinished, between my grandmother and me, now gone forever. And especially those preambles about the different climbers and how they’d died and then their travels in the afterlife – I found I’d enjoyed them more than I’d realized at the time, obsessed then by the need for denouement, and I wanted them back, but they’d lost their footing, as it were. No stairs at the end now, just an abyss. I kept wondering for a long time afterward if I’d missed something, if I’d maybe dozed off at the wrong moment after all or failed to understand a vital clue. Only years later, about the time my grandmother died and began her own climb – or rather, vice versa – did I finally understand that there was nothing more to search for, that I had indeed got the point. It was, as my grandmother had intended from the first step on, her principal legacy to me …

  Mark was right, there was someone in there with her. I could hear them talking. My mother-in-law was saying something in that flat moralistic tone of hers about ‘sucking the mother’s finger.’ A euphemism, I supposed, leaning toward the door: I hadn’t heard her speak like that before. ‘So he was married, then,’ the man said, his voice muffled, ‘and raped a woman who was as well as dead.’

  ‘Yes. And then he left her and forgot her, as you might expect. Though later, he went back and prolonged his illicit amours, it being his dissolute nature.’

  ‘I see. So it’s not true about the mother-in-law, the accusations, I mean, that she murdered – or at least tried—’

  ‘How could it be? It’s impossible when you think about it. No, it was his wife, who, with good reason, put in execution those so-called horrible desires …’

  ‘That’s a very serious accusation, m’um. Yet my own experience tells me it must be so. Funny how, with repetition, it gets all turned around.’

  ‘What are we waiting outside for, Daddy?’

  ‘Sshh! Don’t bother Grandma!’ I whispered and eased the door on open.

  I was sure they’d heard us, but if so, they gave no indication. She was in her rocking chair and the man was on the floor at her feet, his head in her lap. ‘You’ve been so much help to me,’ he said. It was Inspector Pardew. She seemed to be stroking his temples. ‘I’d always thought of that story as a parable on time – the hundred years compressed to a dream, the bastard birth of chronology, then our irrational fear of losing it. The destruction of dawn and all our days, our sun, our moon, seemed so horrible that only something beyond our imagination, like a demon or an ogre, could be responsible. But, of course, all it takes is a jealous wife …’

  ‘Yes, but one mustn’t forget the prior crime, the one that set the rest in motion—’

  ‘Daddy? There’s something hard inside Peedie.’

  ‘Yes, all right …’

  ‘Why are we whispering?’

  The Inspector looked up. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said irritably, and put his head b
ack down in her lap. He was wearing his scarf again, clasping the ends with one hand. I pushed the door shut behind us. ‘You were saying, m’um, the original—?’

  ‘You know, the party, the disgruntled guest, the curse. The stabbing …’

  ‘Ah yes – but was it really a crime? Or only a sort of prior condition?’

  ‘Get it out, Daddy!’

  ‘All right, all right.’ I laid him in his bed and drew a loose sheet up over him (he kicked it off), took up the stuffed bunny. I knew, even before I’d pushed my finger in the hole and touched it, what it was. ‘It makes him stronger, Mark, like a backbone – you sure you don’t want to leave it in there—?’

  ‘I want it out! It hurts him!’ The Inspector sighed impatiently and closed his eyes. Mark was tired and on edge from all the excitement – the least thing and he could break into one of his tantrums. I reached in with two fingers, clamping the handle, pushing down on the point from the outside.

  ‘Perhaps, like you say, I’ve been struggling with this problem too long,’ Pardew brooded. ‘I feel as I circle around it, groping, scrutinizing, probing, that something is trying to be born here – but that, unfortunately, it might already be dead.’ My mother-in-law flinched at this. ‘I’m sorry, did I—?’

  ‘No … a memory …’

  The end of the handle was protruding now: I drew it out, remembering something my wife had said, shortly after she came home from the hospital: ‘It’s not the loss, Gerald, there are others waiting to be born, but rather …’

  ‘Daddy, I’m afraid of the dark.’

  I stooped to kiss him and tuck him in. ‘Rather,’ my wife had said, ‘it’s the way it hated me at the end, I knew everything it was thinking, the terrible bitterness and rage it felt, it would have killed me if it could – and what was worse, I agreed with it …’ ‘Well, it’s not dark now.’