Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  Self-possession shone in Seaton’s mother’s features, easy control of her desires and of her household in her posture. Then in her late thirties (no more than that, certainly), she struck Stevie as the epitome of mature womanhood, a figure from a New Yorker ad for French perfume or a glossy American limousine. You seldom met anyone like this woman on the shores of Scottsdale Lake, where, by contrast, most females wore dungarees, shorts and halter tops, or even the kinds of rugged khakis and work clothes favored by their husbands.

  “Here’s another shot,” Seaton said.

  This time she wore jodhpurs, riding boots, and an open-necked shirt of red-and-white plaid, the swell of her breast against the fabric as soft and palpable as cotton batting. Built, Ted would have said. Although Mrs. Benecke did not smile into the camera, her face and body hinted at a feeling of secretive good humor, as if she knew something rare and exciting that she did not wish to disclose to the photographer or the anonymous beholder of this slide. The field of red clover in which she stood underscored this impression. As did the blue of the sky, the green of the jonquil stems, and the myriad golden dandelion heads bobbing on the crimson clover sea.

  “This one’s my favorite, though.”

  The changer clicked, and there knelt Seaton’s mother in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved white shirt—with her thirteen-year-old son in her arms. The boy was receiving a kiss on the temple from her clover-red lips. Wearing a complacent, she-owes-me-this look, he slumped toward his mother as if she must hold him up or else watch him crack his head on the sun deck’s bottom step. She supported him without protest, honoring his unspoken demand with the glimmer of an indulgent smile in her eyes. No glamour gal here, she was still in Stevie’s opinion wickedly handsome, more threatening in tomboy garb than in sequins and silver-lamé slippers. Now, of course, she would be approaching fifty—if she had not long since attained it.

  “What’s the point of this, Seaton?”

  “Billy Jim, ma’am.”

  “Right. Please tell me why you’re flicking your mother’s whole portfolio past us. Another facet of your Ridpest training?”

  Seaton pressed the changer button, and the mother-and-son portrait slipped away into white-light oblivion, and there popped up a photo of his mother in the company of Sam and Elsa Kensington, all three in dirty leisure clothes at the end of a small wooden pier projecting into the lake. Seaton hit the changer again, and the screen showed this same group gathered around a cast-iron pot in which floured filets of bass swirled in a riot of boiling peanut oil. Hamlin Benecke—or Mr. Blakely, as Seaton would undoubtedly have called him—was conspicuous by his absence. Maybe, during this forgotten summer almost thirteen years ago, the Kensingtons had befriended Mrs. Benecke and her lonely adolescent son. How long had that relationship lasted? Dr. Elsa seldom mentioned it, so Stevie assumed that it had been a short-lived “friendship,” a fleeting summer chumminess that, years later, you can scarcely believe occurred.

  “I hid out when they came around,” Seaton said. “I didn’t much like company.”

  “You saw them often?” Stevie asked, her heart beating hard.

  “Nah. I didn’t like people to come around. ’Crets wasn’t there to talk to, in those days, but when butt-insky neighbors left us alone, well, we did okay, Mom and me.”

  “You mean you did okay,” Betty Malbon said. “Your mama likely enjoyed a bit of grown-up company.”

  Seaton punched the changer button. An empty square of light flashed onto the sheet, a blank like the blankness in his eyes—which suddenly blazed sapphire-blue and fixed Stevie with the stickpins of a long-pent hostility. Stevie tried not to squirm beneath this gaze.

  “I still don’t see the point of all this,” she said.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, Seaton, I—”

  “You’ve known a long time, but you’ve pretended you didn’t. That was the summer your husband spent screwin’ my mom, Mrs. Crye.”

  Stevie winced. “It’s time you left, Seaton. Pack up your monkeys, your slides, and all your other lies and get the hell out.”

  “Okay,” he said. “My name’s Seaton Benecke. You knew it all along. I’m confessing it, okay?” He pointed his chin at the screen and snapped another slide into view. “But tell me who this is, ma’am. Tell me this good-lookin’ fella’s name, why don’t you?”

  There, in the same thronelike wicker chair in which Seaton’s mother had earlier appeared, sat Theodore Martin Crye, Sr., just as Stevie remembered him from the first days of their marriage. He was dressed in work clothes—a short-sleeved blue shirt, heavy-soled shoes, and the uniform-like navy-blue trousers he wore on his plumbing and electrical jobs—but the precise part in his hair, the sophisticated half-smile on his lips, and the freezer-frosted glass in his hands (containing either a gin-and-tonic or an exotic vodka concoction) gave him the air of a youthful shipping magnate, say, or a data-equipment executive on holiday. Although Ted had seldom grown blurry-eyed from drinking, Stevie could tell by his look of hyper-vigilant lassitude (an oxymoronic state unique to Ted) that he was tipsy. Probably no one else but Stevie would have noticed.

  “You were seven- or eight-months pregnant when this picture was taken,” Seaton said. “Summer of 1968. In June, the trap under our cottage’s kitchen sink rusted out. Before that, our garbage-disposal unit had been on the fritz. Mom called the Kensingtons—’cause she knew they lived out there, and Dr. Sam had been to Daddy’s store a few times—to ask what to do. Dad never came up from Columbus except on weekends, and they recommended she call Ted Crye in Barclay. She did, and he came out to replace the trap and fix the disposal. That’s how they met.”

  “So he had a drink on your sun deck. That doesn’t mean he was—”

  “—screwin’ my mom?”

  “That there was anything illicit between them. Ted never charged much for what he did. Sometimes people gave him a drink, or sent home baked goods, or repaid his work with favors of different kinds.”

  “Yeah.” Seaton’s stare turned into a contemptuous leer. “What shit.”

  Stevie looked at Sister C. “I won’t listen to this. I don’t take foul language from my kids, and I won’t take it from this creep, either.”

  “Shit!” Seaton repeated.

  Stevie said, “Self-definition, Seaton.” Trying to rise, she found that Betty Malbon had placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Better listen to him, child. It’s ugly soap-opera stuff, but it happened to him, and it hurt him, and he’s got no other motivation—outside of being a nobody in his own family, that and bushels of smashed or unfulfilled hopes—for what he’s doing. It’s all coming down on you, Stevie, ’cause he doesn’t know where else to put it. If you can take it and bob back up, well, you’ll beat him. That’s what this chapter’s all about.”

  “About lies, Betty? The profanation of a good man’s memory? That’s what this chapter’s about?”

  “Yeah,” Seaton said. “Ol’ Ted sure had a lot of work at Scottsdale Lake that summer. Lots of calls from the cottages.”

  “I don’t remember,” Stevie said curtly.

  “He did, ma’am. Lots of ’em. Most from Mrs. Hamlin Benecke—Lynnette she had him call her when he was out there, just like she called him Theodore. He probably told you he was going someplace else, though. You don’t remember because you had a load in your belly and a load on your mind. Where were you gonna get money for a crib? When was sweet ol’ Ted gonna paper the nursery, keep sensible hours, or write down income and outgo like a regular businessman? A man with kids couldn’t be so loosie-goosie as Ted always was.”

  “Ted took work where he found it,” Stevie said.

  “Favors too, huh? Free sweets from grateful mothers?”

  “Insinuation and innuendo,” Stevie appealed to the Sister. “He shows me one picture of Ted in semiquestionable circumstances—a drink in his hand—and starts building a dozen episodes of As the World Turns on top of it. It’s soap-opera stuff, all right—but it didn’t
happen.”

  Seaton appeared to have been waiting for this rigorous defense of Ted, for Stevie’s words prompted him to click off a sequence of painfully incriminating slides. Ted and Lynnette on the cottage’s sun deck. Ted and Lynnette playfully wrestling on the end of the dilapidated pier. Ted and Lynnette in the front seat of the GM truck that Seaton’s mother used to commute between Columbus and Scottsdale Lake. And six or seven more shots of the couple, the last few slides flitting by so rapidly that Stevie could not register their locations or the degree of intimacy between her husband (a man only two years older than Seaton was now) and the wholesome-looking middle-aged vamp who had so obviously (damn her!) taken out a sublease on his affections. For what Stevie could not mistake was that an unseemly intimacy had indeed existed, and that Lynnette Benecke’s grownup weirdo of a son had not fabricated the relationship that these photos chronicled. Each new slide bolstered Seaton’s indictment of Ted. Together, they dismantled the rambling palace of illusions that Stevie now inhabited. She watched the slides appear and disappear—appear and disappear—hypnotized by this remorseless process of destruction. Ted and Lynnette were a truly attractive couple. . . .

  “I stayed out of the way when he came around,’’ Seaton was saying. “I stayed out of the way when anybody came around, but Mom let me know she liked me out of the way when Mr. Crye showed up. And he showed up lots of afternoons. Sometimes I’d huddle in my room with a pencil and a notepad and write down all my wishes ten times each, to make ’em come true, and what I used to write most was ‘Let Mr. Crye die.’ Yeah. It took a long, time for that one to work out, and by the time it did, my mother had already just missed killing herself taking too many aspirins and drawing a razor across her wrists. . . . Anyway, Daddy kept it out of the papers, him and his big-shot buddies in Columbus, but Mom’s crazier than I am now.

  “If me wishing ‘Let Mr. Crye die’ had worked when I wished it, if it had kept Mom from screwin’ your precious Ted silly, well, I don’t know, maybe she wouldn’t have turned into such a slut. But my magic didn’t work so well in those days. I didn’t know how to give it a . . . a special twist. So Mom dropped her britches and let ol’ Ted wiggle and wriggle and tickle inside her, perhaps she’ll die. One day, when it’s too late. It’s too late already, though, your husband a cooze hound and my mama a slut.”

  “Seems to me,” said Sister C., “you and Stevie here are in the same boat, Mr. Benecke. Your mama hurt you, acting how she did, and you’re trying to even things up by hurting this woman. Doesn’t make much sense, young man. You’ve got things in common. You could be friends.” To Stevie she said, “I’m supposed to say that. He won’t listen, though. He’s not just a young man-fella disgusted by his mama’s passions and browbeat by his daddy’s put-downs. Oh, no, he’s a potion of free-floatin’ cosmic evil, Satan’s personal Ridpestman. And to Satan, I’m afraid, pests to be got rid of always include honesty, kindness, and all such halfway decent folks as happen to have ’em.”

  “Sister —”

  “I’m just saying you’re playing for high stakes against a dangerous foe, child.”

  Stevie ignored this extraordinary aside to address the twenty-six-year-old potion of free-floating cosmic evil: “Listen, Seaton, it’s possible you’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. They were seeing each other, Ted and your mother, but they never . . . maybe they never had relations.”

  “You don’t want to get to the nitty-gritty,” he said. “You don’t want to go deep to see what makes people tick.”

  “Seaton, they may have turned to each other for companionship. I looked like a water rat with a stomach tumor that summer. I was always irritable, always worried about money, not an attractive or sympathetic partner at all. And your mother . . . well, she may have wondered if your father cared about her, letting her go off to spend every summer alone on Scottsdale Lake.”

  “She wasn’t alone.”

  “No, I know she wasn’t. Without adult companionship, I should have said. Ted and she deceived me and your father, that’s true enough, but it’s possible they were using each other to reestablish their personal senses of . . . of self-esteem.”

  “I’ve never heard anything so stupid,” Seaton replied. “Never. You must have been born in Disneyland.”

  “I’m too old to have been born in Disneyland.”

  “Then you’re old enough to watch the rest of my slides. They’re X-rated, and they’ll open your eyes—outdoor porn for menopausal Pollyannas.”

  “Notice how his vocabulary’s improved this chapter,” Sister Celestial advised Stevie. “He’s drawing on reservoirs of Satanic strength.”

  Clicking the changer with ruthless energy, Seaton narrated a slide program like no other Stevie had ever seen. He began with a middle-distance shot of the Benecke cottage, pointing out that on this afternoon Lynnette had asked him to keep watch on the spaghetti sauce in her slow cooker while she and Mr. Crye went down to the lake to check a broken irrigation pipe. This was followed by an interior shot of the ceramic pot, which, in turn, yielded to a rear view of the GM truck in which Ted and Lynnette left for the lake. The irrigation pipe, Lynnette had explained, lay some distance from their pier.

  The couple had been gone only about fifteen minutes, Seaton continued, when the cottage’s electricity went off. The refrigerator ceased humming (a shot of the fridge), the clocks stopped at 3:48 (a sequence of stopped clocks, the only kind a photograph can show), and the soap opera on Channel 9 dwindled away to a magnesium-bright dot that, even without electricity, lingered for thirty seconds (documentary proof of the lingering dot). What now? Seaton wondered. As a precautionary measure, he unplugged the slow cooker.

  Then he set off after his mother and her handyman to ask the latter if he could do anything about the power outage at their cottage. (This narration was accompanied by a shot of Seaton’s schoolboy shadow rippling over a hillock near the lake.) After all, Mr. Crye was an electrician as well as a plumber, and unless the spaghetti sauce cooked a good two hours, his mother would not be able to serve it. They’d have bologna sandwiches and fruit cocktail for supper, a meal that Seaton despised. (A slide of a hypothetical bologna sandwich, garnished with a wilted sprig of parsley, beside a plastic cup of fruit cocktail.) No one should wonder, then, that Seaton had set off in quest of adult aid and consolation.

  “Quack, quack,” the young man with the slide-remote said. He made these syllables sound vaguely like the blatting of a broken Exceleriter or the bleating of a smoke alarm whose battery is about to fail. “Quack, quack.”

  Stevie and Sister C. exchanged a puzzled look, but the Sister, having already read her Remington’s version of Chapter Forty-seven, was merely feigning puzzlement.

  “I quack because you can’t show a noise on a slide,” Seaton explained, “and I don’t have a tape recorder. You see, some folks near the lake were using a duck call, quacking to get the ducks to come up to shore so they could feed them. My mom always kept a couple of bags of stale bread crumbs and sometimes even a box of old popcorn in the back of the pickup. Then we’d go to a secluded part of the lake, quack the ducks to shore, and feed them whatever stuff we’d brought with us. Today, I realized, Mom had gone with Mr. Crye to feed the ducks. They’d forgotten about the goddamn irrigation pipe. There weren’t any goddamn irrigation pipes where that goddamn quacking was coming from.”

  The next sequence of slides excerpted the highlights of Seaton’s trek from the cottage property: a road bordered by cattails; a pine copse traversed by wheel ruts in which pools of muddy lake water stood; a sequestered clearing far from the usual recreational thoroughfares. Seaton pointed out that the intermittent bleating of the duck call had led him to this clearing, where, as the next slide showed, the red GM truck occupied stage-center, its port side parallel to the lake shore, the door to the cab’s passenger side standing completely open, and neither his darling mother nor the annoying Theodore Crye anywhere in sight.

  “The duck call had stopped,” Seaton said. “I’d begun
to think it’d been a real duck making the noise. Down by the lake, you see, someone had set out a big shallow box of popcorn, and a flock of ducks—some the tame white kind you see on farms, some mallards with green heads—this flock was fighting to gobble down the popcorn. The ducks’ heads went up and down, up and down, pecking, pecking, pecking. It reminded me of typebars going up and down in the basket of an old-fashioned typewriter. Peck, peck, peck. Peck, peck, peck.”

  “It would,” murmured Stevie.

  “More ducks kept coming up from the lake. Some flew in from the other side, dropping their silly webbed feet for landing gear and flapping to a standstill just offshore. The early birds had typed their way through a couple of reams of popcorn, though, and most of the latecomers didn’t get any. I couldn’t understand why the person blowing that duck call—my mother, your husband, whichever of ’em—had just kept blowing the damn thing. Then it quacked again, and it was coming from the truck cab—which, until then, I’d thought nobody was in.”

  “Why don’t you stop now?” Sister Celestial asked Seaton.

  “I can’t do that, Sister. It’s nitty-gritty time again.” He closed his eyes in self-reproach. “I’ve probably shilly-shallied around too long as it is.”

  “Get it over with, then,” the prophetess urged him. “You don’t have any feel for healthy eroticism, only the guilty kind, and Stevie’s done suffered enough at your hands.”

  Stevie dug her fingernails into her palms and rose from her chair. “I’ve withstood every bit of it, too, haven’t I? But if you persist—if you go on to the next slide—I swear, Seaton, I’ll kill you.”

  “Sex and violence,” he replied. “But you’ve taken the wrong approach, ma’am, because I’ve never, ever got enough of them. I’ve been deprived that way.” His thumb depressed the changer button, and a grotesque image—an interior of the GM cab with two ill-defined human figures horizontally disposed on the Leatherette-upholstered seat—replaced the tight panorama of the truck in the clearing. “Here’s what I saw walking up to the open door on the passenger side. It tore me up. I’d never seen anything like it before.”